E-sports HutchCC students power on their monitors to compete at the collegiate level.
Hannah Brummer, Reporter & Designer
E-Sports is growing rapidly in colleges and universities across the U.S., it has even reached quite a few of the other schools here in Kansas. Hutchinson Community College recently started their own E-Sports team. “We are hoping to hold tryouts for the team for the 2021-2022 school year,” said Heath Hensley, E-Sports Coach and Computer Support Instructor. Coached by Hensley, the team consists of Bailey Nachtigal, Caleb Spencer, Christyn Howard, Clayton Huston, Dakota Wolfe, Justen Ortega, Lane Pitts, Morgun Roeder, and Zoe Barta. “Currently practices are one day a week for a couple hours. Up until the last week of October, we did not have our arena done so we mostly did team building, working on soft skills, and made decisions for our future actions once we could get into the arena to play the games,” said Zoe Barta, Ellsworth. One of the additions to the most recent renovation of Parker Student Union was the E-Sports arena in the
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basement. The arena consists of topof-the-line gaming PCs, top-of-theline gaming keyboards, high-powered monitors and webcams. “As of right now all of the games are PC, but a lot of them are cross platform so they are games the team members have played on devices like XBox, PlayStation 4, or even the Switch,” said Hensley. The team consists of students from different majors. Whether a student is majoring in computer technology, nursing, elementary education, or even auto mechanics, if they have a passion for gaming, they can try out for the team. Being on the E-Sports team can be a place where they can go and have fun doing what they love with their new teammates. “I would absolutely encourage others to come and try out,” said Morgun Roeder, Buhler. “We are in the process of really trying to make an amazing E-Sports program for the college and the more people we have, the better the program can become. Also, it’s just a good opportunity to
meet people. The team has grown really close just from the meetings, building up to the completion of our setup. So if nothing else, come and try out and maybe meet some people you otherwise wouldn’t have.” During practice they will work on their skills on many different games. “The games they play are - Overwatch, Rainbow Six Siege, Rocket League, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Valorant, and a few others that we are looking at but we have not made a decision on them yet,” said Hensley Aside from the weekly practices, the team has to motivate themselves to practice on fine tuning their skills on their own time. “On my own time I put about five to six hours a week of practicing and improving my skills. As a team I would probably expect us to put two to four hours in a week, just to keep ourselves on top of things,” said Bailey Nachtigal, Hutchinson.
Dragon’s Tale • E-Sports
11/12/20 1:52 PM
