Esports club has begun its season, with practices on Mondays and tournament days on Tuesdays after school, the club aims to share the love of gaming with others around the school.
Two games are offered in the former ISS room where Esports hosts its meetings. Super Smash Bros is practiced on a Nintendo Switch connected to sponsor Robert Holmes’s old TV and League of Legends is set up on five Alienware computers each with light-up keyboards and matching gaming chairs.
“I think people should join because you’ll meet friends and other people who play the same games that you do,” senior Amy Nguyen said. “I think especially for me, Monday and Tuesdays are the hardest days of the week to get through and having gaming to look forward to after school is, I think that could be really beneficial.
Nguyen first started playing League of Legends five years ago when visiting her cousins for Christmas, through social media she found out about high schools hosting esports programs and discovered McNeils shortly after.
“I did a little bit of the game freshman year and that’s how I found out that we actually had one,” Nguyen said. “Then it didn’t really happen sophomore year, but junior year I had to go out of my way to contact teachers and actually get the program starting again.”
Nguyen contacted several teachers to try and start the club up again, after reaching out, she was finally able to settle on the current sponsor.
“First I contacted coach Hall, I think because he first ran it, he told me he couldn’t do it because of football season,” Nguyen said. “He gave me two other teachers to contact and right now, the current sponsor that I’m working with for the club is Mr. Holmes.”
Last year the League of Legends team went 14-2 while the Super Smash Bros team went 8-8 for their matches. Senior Arnav Sundaram hopes to make state-level finals for League of Legends, with the team currently holding a 5-2 record.
“Last year, I made it to the semi-finals, I kind of want to see what happens after we win the state, just to see what happens after,” Sundaram said. “Even if there isn’t anything, I just think it’d still be cool to win at least something before I graduate because we only have five people, which is the minimum requirement, the school we played last week had 14 kids.”
Last year’s semi-final series started at 4:40 p.m. and lasted until 7:30 p.m., Sundaram recounts the game as the most surreal moment in the club.
“That team had some guy who’s top 500 in the state for the whole game, which is crazy,” Sundaram said. “It was the second game and we were not sure if we were gonna lose, we really wanted to win. And so that second game, I sort of took over. I played the best game I ever had, we ended up winning [the match] and [I] kept us in the game on multiple occasions until after 55 minutes we made one mistake on our last fight and ended up losing. it was still really fun because I felt like I was able to compete with some of the best players in the country and also impress everyone, myself included.”
The team hopes to continue winning matches and plans to expand the club’s game choices by reaching out to the district.
“I know a bunch of people who play so many other games that the platform supports, but we don’t support,” Nguyen said. “By getting more games we can have more people compete and possibly place really high in these types of divisions.”
Nguyen believes expanding the club would benefit students since colleges offer scholarships for their esports programs.
“In college, they scout your high school career, like how they would for actual sports, like football and volleyball,” Nguyen said. “They’ll see how good you are and if they see that you have a good track record, then they might come out and offer you a scholarship to play whatever game that school might be competing in.”
Nguyen believes a common misconception is that the gaming community is negative, but she recounts that in her experience it’s not like that.
“League is notorious for having the most toxic community and just the gaming community in general,” Nguyen said. “A staple of gaming is people smashing their keyboards out of frustration or whatever. But it’s not like that at all, from what I’ve observed people in the club are supportive of each other. And yes, we do get down after losses and stuff, but it’s not anger. We’re supportive of each other and we try to learn from our mistakes whenever we lose games.”
Last year Holmes took a backseat role in coaching since the players had more of an idea of what they were doing, this year he has taken more of a coaching role to help the club adapt to a new play style and tries his best to communicate, which is why Sundaram thinks people would benefit from joining.
“Mr. Holmes is a great sponsor because he wants us to win, he’s honestly one of my favorite teachers in school just because he seems almost like one of us,” Sundaram said. “He knows all the references and everything. The club itself, the people in there, they’re great people, some of them aren’t as talkative, but whenever we’re playing, you see their personality come out because they’re having fun. ”
Esports welcomes anyone to attend meetings after school at B215, to join League of Legends students can compete for a spot and Super Smash Bros rotates its players.
“E-Sports, the name just sounds, when I hear it, I get weirded out, because it’s electronic sports, right?” Sundaram said. “But whenever you play it’s fun because you don’t think about other people. You’re just in the moment. You’re just with these random people you met 30 minutes ago at the first meeting and now you’re playing in a game, some people enjoy that and find it fun. And so gaming itself, I like it and it’s just a part of me and it’s always gonna be there.”
