Esports Lab Opens at West Virginia Northern Community College Campuses – Wheeling Intelligencer

Labs for use by esports teams were unveiled Monday morning for use by WVNCC students, with 12 Alienware computers distributed across the three campuses. Matt Thorn, a recruiter for the college, said many prospective students had been curious if the college offered opportunities for coaching and development of competitive gaming skills, which led to the development of the labs.

“The same thing kept coming up – video games, video games,” Thorn said. “… They started talking about watching people play video games, and how that relates to competitive gaming. There are people getting coaches and things so they can play games better. … Students are getting coaches to try and get scholarships for school.

“We were able to get some money to start an esports team. We’re in the early phases right now, we’re playing internally, so we’re not in a league yet. Our goal is to start playing against larger schools and things like that competitively.”

In the last few months while the labs were being completed, Thorn said, students had been competing internally in several games, most prominently Rocket League and Fortnite. Director of student engagement Regan Blath said students had been surveyed to find out what games they were most interested in, also including NBA 2K and Minecraft.

photo by: Alan Olson

Students at West Virginia Northern Community College check out the new esports computer lab.

Students will either be able to log into their own gaming accounts, or use accounts provided to them.

“In the next couple weeks, here in these labs, they’ll be able to play whatever they want to play,” Blath said. “… If they’re a beginner, we do have games already downloaded for them, so they just hop on, we’ll give them an ID and login information, and they can play.”

Blath said she hopes to further develop WVNCC’s esports presence to a point where they can play against other schools at a competitive level.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg. This was an idea that was brought about during COVID, and we do plan on going further by making this club play at the collegiate level, but right now we’re just trying to get interest from our students, interest from the outside community, and hopefully a lot of buy-in from that. Once that buy-in comes, we’ll grow this to a big program here.”

Students at West Virginia Northern Community College check out the new esports computer lab.