Monroe’s esports team fundraising for uniforms | News | dailyprogress.com – The Daily Progress

The first-ever video game competition took place at Stanford University in 1972, with five students competing in an “intergalactic Spacewar Olympics” for the grand prize of a year’s subscription to Rolling Stone magazine. (From “History of Esports,” University of New Haven Online). Nearly 50 years later, the 2019 “League of Legends” World Championship finals in South Korea hit nearly 100 million unique viewers (more than that year’s Super Bowl). Now players from William Monroe High School in Greene County are getting in on the esports action.

“Engaging with their passion through esports is a fantastic way to reach students in a space they want to be, while rewarding positive behaviors and skill development,” says esports competition host Play Versus (PlayVS) on its website. “It encourages them to form social bonds and find community while pursuing something they care about.”

William Monroe players first formed an informal esports team in early 2020, just prior to the shuttering of schools at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. After struggling through staffing changes, virtual learning and the limitations of rural internet connections, the team reformed in fall 2021 under the leadership of high school English teacher Mike Kelty.

“I’ve never done anything like this before,” Kelty admitted. “I just grew up playing video games—I grew up on the Atari 2600 back when that was the peak of technology and I’ve had just about every system since then. So I’m an enthusiast learning how to be an esports coach… and it’s been a blast—it’s exactly as much fun as I hoped it would be.”

The team meets in the digital media lab and this spring will be fielding eight teams in four different games. Super Smash Brothers Ultimate (a fantasy platform/fighting game) and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (a popular racing game) are two Nintendo Switch titles running competitions through PlayVS this year. For PC titles, the Dragons are competing in Rocket League (think soccer played in tiny cars) and Smite (multiplayer online battle arena featuring Greek and Roman gods/goddesses).

Rocket League is played in teams of three, and the Dragons have three teams competing this spring (Team 1: Cooper Morris, Jacob Smith, Brice Earney; Team 2: Andrew Butts, Landon Frye, Connor Lawson; Team 3: Harrison Graham, Eric Basel, Justin Williams). Smite is a team of five with Jeffrey Wallace, Dylan Thompson, Maya Anderson, Vaughn Whittaker and Zahir Thompson. Super Smash Brothers is in teams of three with Zachary Northcutt, Aiden Clements and Lucas Cropp on team one and Liam Morgan, Landon Frye and Jacob Dulin on team two. Mario Kart is in teams of four: Payton Saylor, Matthew Hensley, Paige Luber and Shawna Nyabuto make up team one and Ashton Savage, Enrique Hernandez-Munoz, Gabriel Bailey and Hannah Hjelm make up team two.

With so many interested players this year, technology has become a hurdle for the team.

“We need to start raising funds,” Kelty said. “We would like to play John Madden Football but that’s a PlayStation exclusive and we would need to get a number of PlayStations in order to do that—and that’s expensive. We got lucky this year in that the athletic department purchased one of the (Nintendo) Switches and then … PlayVS paired us with Nintendo to get us that extra Switch through a giveaway.”

The Nintendo systems are set up in the media lab with two large televisions while the Rocket League and Smite groups practice on computers in the adjoining classroom.

“Smite plays on their own computers at home—there aren’t enough computers to play here,” Kelty explained.

One of the complications of using school computers is that the digital media lab and classroom—completed in 2019 as part of a multimillion-dollar renovation of the school—is outfitted with Macintosh computers. Competitive games are all run through PC software, and loading Windows operating systems onto a Macintosh computer is somewhat of an I.T. nightmare, according to Kelty.

“It slows the computers way down, so it takes forever to set up for matches and things like that,” he said. “But once they’re in the game there’s not much of an issue.”

Virginia High School League (VHSL) in May 2019 approved a one-year pilot program for esports competitions, with plans to consider it for potential sanctioning as an official activity for the league after feedback on the initial year. Of course, as with everything else in 2020, things changed with the COVID-19 pandemic. The VHSL Executive Committee voted at the end of last year to “reset the clock” for esports, giving it until 2023-24 to determine if esports will become a fully sanctioned (and funded) activity.

“PlayVS made exemptions during the pandemic to play from home, but whenever we get through all of this they’re going to want us to play exclusively at school and we don’t have the equipment,” Kelty said. “Our second Rocket League team plays in here because two of the players don’t have stable internet to be able to play (from home).”

With seasons in both fall and spring, some high school athletes who are busy with other sports during the fall are free to join the esports team in the spring semester—including Marching Dragons drum major Shawna Nyabuto and several members of the football team. Super Smash Brothers was just added in 2021 and Mario Kart is also brand-new to PlayVS for 2022, so that has been a big draw to students who grew up playing the games. In fact, 12 of the 28 team members have just joined in the past two months.

“I’ve played Smash Bros forever but just kind of like with friends and stuff,” Kelty said. “Getting into the esports side of it, the really top players know their character and all the other characters inside out and their combos and how to lure them into combos and the really elite ones know the weaknesses of the ones that they’re playing (against).”

In Super Smash, players select from a pool of almost 90 different fighters from a variety of different video games. Each character has its own strengths and abilities and players try to use those advantages to knock their opponents out of a stage.

“I was interested because I started playing with some friends during lunch,” said senior Gabriel Bailey, who joined the team in the fall. “Somebody had a Switch and I just kind of got into the game again after years and years of not playing it. I decided to come down and I met all these people … I don’t necessarily play in the meets and stuff; I just enjoy having it more like a club and place to hang out after school.”

Zachary Northcutt is also a senior and a first-timer to esports.

“I’ve been a fan of the game for a while and I’m generally better than most of my friends at it, so it was kind of getting boring, to be honest, just winning all the time,” he said. “The thing about Smash is there’s a compendium of a bunch of different characters from a bunch of different games.”

Northcutt’s favorite video game franchise—Kingdom Hearts—just added its main character to the Super Smash lineup.

“It is a super diverse cast; the game is pretty well balanced so almost any character is viable in the competitive scene if you’re just good enough at it,” he said. “A lot of people don’t understand that esports is just like any other sports—it takes a lot of work to be as good as these people are.”

Northcutt added that due to the importance of split-second timing in competitive gaming, using unreliable WiFi can easily mess with your movements and cost you a game. He hopes they will soon be able to return to playing matches in person versus other local teams.

“I’m better now than I was at the beginning of last season,” he said. “And my teammates are better too. In the beginning, there were huge disparities between our players and their skill levels, but because you always want to rise to meet the challenge that your competitors bring you, everybody got better.”

Kelty said he’s looking forward to designing team uniforms to bring a sense of pride to the students.

“That’s one of the things I love about esports … this gives a representation in school activities to a group of students who normally wouldn’t have participated—you have this sense of pride in playing for the school for kids that may not have ever experienced that before,” he said. “It’s been really cool to watch them grow from a group of individuals that have similar passions into a team.”

In addition to purchasing team uniforms, Kelty is hoping the group can raise enough funds to purchase a third Switch and eventually a few new Windows-based computers.

The first matches of the season will feature both Super Smash Brothers teams on Wednesday, Feb. 23, and Rocket League, Mario Kart and Smite on Thursday, Feb. 24, all after press time. Visit PlayVS.com or find William Monroe on Twitch to watch the live stream or check match scores.