All the Right Moves

Before Jordan Ford ’20 earned a basketball scholarship at Saint Mary’s, before he was the Sacramento Bee’s two-time high school Basketball Player of the Year, he was something perhaps no other college Division I basketball player can claim: a two-time state chess champion, before he ever got serious about basketball.

“I started playing chess when I was 4 years old,” Ford said. “I didn’t go to preschool, instead I was taught chess. It was pretty much the first thing my dad taught me. He started playing in college and he just thought it was a great game for the mind, to make you think moves ahead.”

Ford didn’t just learn how to move the pieces at that young age. He took the game very seriously. “I started training pretty intensely when I was 5,” he said. “I was training probably six hours a day. It was pretty much all I did, I just loved it, going over grandmasters’ games, learning tactics so I could get better. I used to go play at the chess club in Sacramento with adults, and they’d have to stack up two chairs so I could see over the chessboard.”

Ford won age-group state championships as a kindergartener and second-grader. He had a good excuse for not winning in first grade; the player who beat him, Nicholas Nip, went on to become the youngest American chess master in history, a distinction formerly held by future world champion Bobby Fischer.

“Nobody ever believes me the first time I tell them about chess,” Ford said with a laugh. “I have to actually show them proof most of the time, like my trophies, or they look on the internet and see a story about it. It’s just weird to transfer from chess to basketball.”

Ford got serious about basketball when he was 8, and while he still plays chess, he does it now just for fun and not competitively. But he says his chess experience has helped him in basketball.

“As a young kid I really learned how to work hard at something,” he said. “Once I got to basketball training it was a lot easier for me to do a two-hour session than it was to just sit at the board for six hours. Chess just helps you think on a different level than any other sport. Many people don’t think of it as a sport, but I think of it as a mental sport.”