The Augustana esports teams are off to a great start, with the Valorant team starting the season 3-0. This is after the Vikings beat the University of Arkansas Razorbacks 2-0, Thursday, Oct. 9, and the League of Legends team started off 2-1.
Payton Tucker, who is entering his third year as the director of esports, isn’t just crediting the players’ gameplay, but also the foundation they built for the program. The players’ leadership continues to help guide both returning players and newcomers.
“The people who have been here for three or four years know expectations of the program, and filled in that leadership role tell the new guys on the team how things go here and kind of what to expect in terms of practice and game day prep,” Tucker said. “I think it’s just mostly expectations, and the banners that we have and trophies, they can look at those to see what we’ve done in the past, and continue that tradition.”
The Super Smash Bros team is also off to a strong start, having two wins in the first four weeks of the season across their eight teams. Their 2-2 record matches their win total from last year’s season, where the team went 2-20. With three players having graduated from last year’s roster, what could have been a major blow to the team may instead be an opportunity for new faces to show what they have.
“Our Blue Team, which is our main team, has almost graduated the whole team,” Tucker said. “Having the depth that we had in Smash Bros at 12 [players] last year, now we have 10 with a couple of new admissions. Having a completely new main team is a different team culture; they view it as a fresh start, almost.”
Unlike traditional sports, where teams return every year to play the same conference and teams each year, most esports teams must earn their spot through placement matches at the start of the season. The better they do, the higher division they will be placed in.
For the Rocket League team this year, the process looked different. Senior Carter Chalberg said he saw the division placement as a positive for the team and expects the team to do better than last year’s 5-5 season record.
“I think our record will be better just because we’re in a lower division than we were last year,” Chalberg said. “We did our placement matches last year, we won one out of the three, and they put us in Division seven when there are eight divisions total. Then we told them that our third player was a higher rank when we actually went to play with him. He was much lower than he had told us in the first place, so we just got rolled through the whole season.”
Esports at Augustana is starting to be taken more seriously and is growing, especially as more people recognize the time and effort players put into their games. One key part of the growth of esports is the social media attention. Junior Chole Brees is on the Overwatch team and social media and streaming team for Augustana, and said she sees the esports team becoming more popular and attracting more attention.
“It’s just becoming more and more popular, and more people are recognizing it as a sport, rather than just a club,” Brees said. “I understand that people don’t consider it a sport because it’s not so physical, but we are dedicating the same amount of time that a regular sport would. I think just the visibility and the access for not only players to watch, but also parents at home can watch the streams we’re posting, I think that helps a lot, especially from the streaming side of things.”
The Augustana esports teams hope to continue their strong start, with all squads set to compete again next week as they look to build more momentum and achieve more success.
Correction: The Observer quoted Chloe Brees as Chole Brees in a previous version.
