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Although not considered a traditional sport, competitive video gaming, or esports, has been gaining popularity in the US over the past several years. Now NS has got in on the trend, forming their own competitive esports team that meets every Monday and Wednesday after school.
“When I was in school, the computer lab had Warcraft and Starcraft on it,” said esports assistant advisor Cheyne Christensen, “and I remember before wrestling practices, our coach would come down and we all played a bunch of Starcraft games and it was honestly a lot of fun to interact with all sorts of different people. You had athletes and you had people who were down there just to play games, and it was super fun to just watch all these different personalities come together.”
When Christensen came back to NS as a teacher, he wanted to get an esports program going.
“I remember talking to [Superintendent Nan Ault], wanting to get something like that started,” Christensen said. “And she just said to get with [IT specialist Tasmin Valko], and so Taz got re-ignited to get it going again.”
Valko took on the task of organizing the esports team and became the club’s advisor.
“We go through the high school esports league, that’s who we go through, that is where the students compete,” Valko said. “So they sign up for their game. I have a couple of chess students, “SuperSmash students,” “Valorant,” and “Rocket League.””
Students who want to get involved in the NS esports team must first get a parent’s signature and pay their fees. Then they can make an account on highschoolesportsleague.com, the website that is used to organize matches.
“What they do is they sign up for an account there, we have passes—they’re called Battle Passes—and I can issue them to the students once they go through making their profile,” Valko said. “Then they get their matches set through there, we have nothing to do with it.”
The matchmaking is based on time zones, so the students are playing against competitors from throughout the intermountain west. In the matchmaking process, students are paired up against each other based on console, game, and skill level. The program keeps track of each student’s win-loss record, and that will be used to arrange a tournament at the end of the season.
“Now, through another partner that we have, which is sieutah.org, they set up a tournament that the kids will be participating in for “Smash” and “Rocket League” in April, and they’ll be playing in state,” Valko said.
While there are other games available to play through the esports league, the NS esports team is mainly competing in “Super Smash Bros” and “Rocket League” right now.
And while right now esports is just a competitive club, the USHAA is in the process of making it a sanctioned, state-supported sport.
“In about two years, it will be a sanctioned sport, but it has to go through a two-year process,” Valko said.
But even though it isn’t an official sport, students still love just getting together and playing video games.
“For now, it’s more of just like we meet up, we practice, we play against each other,” said freshman Lucas Schoppe.
For Christensen though, it’s about helping students make social connections through video games.
“I think video games are not a very social activity, and so anytime that we can bring kids that are gonna go home and play video games anyways, bring them together in an environment that’s safe and they can see all the different kids that have the same interests as well,” Christensen said, “and then kind of make those connections to where you see people in the halls and they can talk about, ‘Oh man, remember what we did yesterday, that was super fun.’ Just trying to make connections, trying to make video games as social as possible.”
