E-Sports
April 8, 2021
Esports is a AAA sanction sport becoming increasingly popular around the world. Cabot High School teams, League of Legends and Rocket League, play in the Fall and Spring season. The coaches are Mrs. Patterson and Mr. Forester. The Fall season Rocket League placed fourth out of 70 teams in the state. League of Legends placed 34th out of 60 teams. The Spring season started and will continue through May. The teams have played three games so far this season.
“We really enjoy this game, I just wanted to play video games at school. I was pretty hyped when I found out about the team. We are good but there are a few teams that are better than us. You need to have good chemistry with your team, it’s very mechanical, you can’t buy anything to make you better, it’s all skills and practice,” sophomore Dylan Koski said.
The Esports team includes some digital students and allows them to come to campus at the end of the day so they can practice with their team. Students can also play from home if needed with quarantine rules.
Coaches Mrs. Patterson and Mr. Forester want to grow the program. They have gotten monitors specifically purchased for the team, they have backlit keyboards, and faster CPUs with more storage for gaming. They are appreciative that the athletic department has given them shirts. The tech department set up the equipment for them.
In the future they’d like to expand the program to include Fifa and Madden as games that the team plays. This will hopefully draw more attention to the program if they can get more games that will spark interest from students.
“I wasn’t into athletics but I’m actually good at this so I figured I’d boost the team a little bit. A lot of people think it’s cool that I’m on the team but some people think it doesn’t matter to anyone”, senior Dylan Jobst said. Some people may think it doesn’t matter but you can get scholarships for this. Henderson is a school in Arkansas that is the first school in the state to offer scholarships and funding to e sports. While that is just one example there are many other schools all over the country that may have an opportunity for e sports players.
Pictured is the Rocket League team, Joey Barlow 11th, Ethan Carroll 11th, Dylan Jobst 12th, Dylan Koski 10th and Thomas Leach 11th.