Esports Attendance Subsists

Allyson Jay | Editor Emerita

Many clubs at the Upper School don’t always maintain their loyal members throughout the school year, but the Esports club is still going strong. Gunnar Johnson ‘23, a leader of the club, notes that “most clubs here usually drop every member by February but we still have, like, around ten consistent members.” the practices involve a lot of yelling, a little bit of screaming, and usually someone’s always complaining.” While the club seems mostly laid-back and low-commitment, they have occasional state-wide tournaments in which members who are qualified for a game get to go and compete at the Mall of America. dios. Johnson and Carlson qualified for the Rocket League bracket. The competition took place over the course of three days, from Jan. 13 to Jan. 15, and consisted of a group of 16 different teams who played against other high school teams in a standard tournament bracket. thete associates a stimulus with a color or a shape, feels an object, or hears sounds that aren’t there. An example of this is grapheme-color synesthesia, a more common type, in which the synesthete sees colors when thinking about letters, numbers, and/or words.

Esports club is a videogaming club made up of multiple teams who each play their own game against other high school teams once a week.

Esports club works with the Minnesota Varsity League (MVL) which is an organization that hosts high schools from around Minnesota to play different video games, from sports games to gun games.

The second category is associative synesthesia, where the synesthete feels a strong connection to the stimulus. Associa- realize it.” Even studies are inconclusive on what percentage of the general population are synesthetes. Some experts believe around 1 in 300 people have this condition, while others claim up to even 20% of the population might have some variation of synesthesia.

A particularly interesting study by the European Commission claims that it’s possible that way it develops. What is known is that for the most part, people are either born with synesthesia or it is developed during early childhood, when children are exposed to a huge sensory environment.

Hecker says, “I can’t really remember a time where I didn’t have synesthesia,” while Ekstrom believes hers developed at an early age because of her family’s musicality.

Club meetings aren’t typical in-person gatherings before or after school, rather, they are always online; the club holds online practices through MVL. Johnson adds, “A lot of

Last month, Johnson and David Carlson ‘23, another club leader, participated in the MVL state competition at the Mall of America hosted by Wisdom Gaming Stu-

Johnson elaborates, “It was pretty fun; we had a large turnout from all the schools and unfortunately we did lose the first round, but it was a fun atmosphere and it was pretty cool to play at the Mall of America.” Though their state competition experience was cut short, Carlson adds, “We were not trying to win, we just wanted to see what it was like. We found it very interesting because we got to talk to college teams and see how other schools with more developed teams operate with coaches and stuff like that.”