It doesn’t take years and years to become a successful team.
Benjamin Russell’s Esports team proved that this season. It was a mere idea not too long ago, but it turned into a Final Four squad in less than a year.
“We’ve been playing now for almost two years and we were scrolling through Instagram one day and saw an ad for PlayVS,” Benjamin Russell captain Andrew Caldwell said. “It said basically you can compete with your high school in Esports. So I went to (BRHS athletic director Pam Robinson) and I asked her, ‘Do you know anything about this? What is the possibility of us creating this?’
“She said she had just been looking for somebody to come to her with the initiative to start it. She was all for it.”
Caldwell and a group of friends, including Zack Salter, Lane Rigby and Blaze Mazilli, got together and created the squad with the help of Emily Sassano, who served as their faculty advisor. The foursome played Rocket League, which Caldwell said is “basically soccer with cars.”
“On a super basic level, it’s three people on one team and three people on another team on a super small field,” Caldwell said. “You get things called boosts and that makes you jump and fly in the air and you’re trying to score. It’s basically just car soccer.”
Esports are now sanctioned by the AHSAA and there are three different games — Rocket League, Smite and League of Legends. Caldwell said Rocket League fit the Wildcats’ interests the best and with the way technology has grown, it allowed the four best friends to have extra time together.
“Gaming started out for us as something to do to pass the time, but it grew into what we did together,” Caldwell said. “We played games because we were good at it but we also got to hang out with each other without being with each other. It was kind of like our way of hanging out.”
Caldwell said most of the work in terms of scheduling and finding opponents is done through PlayVS, which is a third-party company that facilitates the gaming. The Wildcats signed up as a team through the AHSAA then PlayVS set up a schedule. And with everything being done virtually, there aren’t travel costs involved so it’s a relatively cheap sport.
With only three players in each game, Caldwell, Salter, Rigby and Mazilli would do their practices at home then decide who was playing the best each week and that’s who would compete in the game.
In some games, a player can make in-game purchases to improve, but Caldwell said with Rocket League, it’s all about practice.
“There are different cars you can play with and each one hits differently,” Caldwell said. “No car is faster or hits the ball harder or anything, though. They just hit it at different angles. If you’re more technically skilled or more accurate with your shots, you’re naturally going to be better. It’s mainly just practice. There’s no form of ‘buying things’ to get better.”
Whatever the Wildcats were doing worked though as they advanced to the AHSAA Final Four in their very first season.
“The fact that we made it to the Final Four, that’s a pretty big accomplishment,” said Sassano, who admittedly said she knew very little about the game itself. “I don’t really know the games that they’re playing, but I joked with them we went this far because of this awesome coaching of mine. But no, I just think it’s a really cool thing they’ve done and they’ve taught me a lot.”
Although all four are graduating this year, Caldwell is hoping the Esports team at Benjamin Russell will continue and it seemed to catch fire around the school.
“It was exciting for us,” Caldwell said. “Obviously the goal was to win it all, but for the first year, we really laid a solid foundation throughout the school. That’s what people talked about the day of the Final Four game.”
Caldwell, who is also a BRHS soccer player, said he really thinks Esports gives an opportunity to players who aren’t interested in traditional sports.
“I really think we laid a foundation to hopefully help younger kids who may play video games and may feel introverted,” Caldwell said. “I hope they can come out of that shell and see, ‘Hey, I can do this for a purpose.’”
