A Legacy of LIFESAVING

In the summer of 1972, after completing his first year at Mines, Ken Miller (CE 75) and his family were going through one of the most challenging times, to say the least. Miller’s mother had contracted an infection after an operation. Shortly after she was transferred to the Mayo Clinic’s St. Mary’s Hospital, his mother lost her battle.

Miller returned to campus after his mother’s funeral, and he began his sophomore year. Charlie Schultz (ChE 73) , a senior at that time, approached Miller in the Theta Tau fraternity house where they were living. “He said, ‘I don’t know what to say, but if there’s anything we can do, just ask.’”

Miller initially saw this as a nice gesture, but then he remembered that included in his mother’s hospital bill were 38 units of blood. At the time, his parents didn’t have health insurance, and the bill was close to a couple of years of income for Miller’s father.

“I contacted the executive director of the blood bank in Rapid City and said ‘Is there any way we can hold a blood drive and replace those 38 units of blood?’”

The director was pretty sure Mayo Clinic wouldn’t adjust the hospital bill, but he offered to check. It turns out, Mayo Clini c said they would write off the 38 units of blood if Miller could reple nish them.

In March of 1973, 50 years ago, Theta Tau had what MIller believes was the university’s first ever blood drive. It resulted in 52 u nits of blood.

“The results of that were immeasurable to my family,” Miller says.

“What’s amazing to me is that every member in town stepped up to donate,” he says. “There were even four women from third floo r Dake who came down and donated.”

Since then, blood drives have become a regular event on campus. Miller, now retired and an instructor in the mining engineering and management department, regularly donates with his wife.

“Isn’t it amazing how just one comment from a caring person can snowball into a huge, life-giving experience that’s still rolling down the hill?”

“I hope all who donate realize it’s a lifelong way of giving back to the community,” Miller says.

In addition to teaching at Mines, Miller is a donor, a member of the University Choir, and a former member and officer of the CARA Board of Directors. We appreciate his service to South Dakota Mines!

With the clock ticking down, tensions are high. Three seconds left...two...one! Suddenly, the deafening sound of the buzzer fills the air, announcing another glorious triumph for the Hardrocker team! As the players join forces in a jubilant celebration, it’s clear that this victory was hardfought and well-deserved.

What comes to mind? Football? Basketball? Well, in this case, you’d be wrong. This is e-sports, and Mines boasts a highly competitive squad.

Oftentimes, when people think about playing video games, they think about the kid sitting in their basement by themselves, no interactions with others. But that’s not the case at South Dakota Mines. If you have a passion for gaming, then there’s a spot for you in the e-sports community at Mines. The team competes together in the e-sports room in the Surbeck Center, and there’s a flourishing Discord (an instant messaging platform used commonly by gamers) community filled with over 200 students all with the same passion: gaming with their friends.

But we’ll get to that later. First, a little background.

Initially, varsity e-sports fell under the Mines Athletic Department, and the club was a separate entity. But, this year, the two now fall under CAMP.

Amy Hasvold, CAMP director, explains that e-sports is one of 11 different competition teams in CAMP, and just like all the others, it is completely student-led and student-driven. "The move has been a good fit," Hasvold says.

“The coaches are student volunteers, the team captains are students, the student organization has a president, vice president, secretary, treasurer as well as captains that run their varsity teams and then their recreational teams,” Hasvold says. “We just assist them along the way, but they really run their program.”

Competitively, Mines has 35 varsity e-sports players who compete in Valorant, Overwatch, League of Legends, Rocket League, and Super Smash Bros. Members of the student org also play these games and more, such as Minecraft, Apex Legends, and Halo.

Both the competition teams and the club organization work well together, Hasvold added. The student organization now has all the same resources that the varsity players have, and the varsity teams benefit because their rosters are fed by members of the organization. Last semester, Hasvold said about 120 students used the computers located in the e-sports room – both those playing in competitions and recreationally.

The Mines varsity team streams its games on a platform called Twitch, which can be monetized. Like watching football, baseball, or another sport on the TV, e-sports has announcers that commentate on the game. In addition to having people play the games, Mines also has a stable of people who will commentate on the games just like Joe Buck does for Monday Night Football on ESPN.

Nicholas Thompson, a senior physics major at Mines who is affectionally called Coach T by members of the e-sports community, oversees the streams for the club, and says last semester, the club made $200 on their streams alone.

“The stream team, when I first started here, was nonexistent. I was the last officer to be appointed by our founder, and my job was to maintain the streams,” Thompson says. “I was officially the officer of streams and publications for a year. Throughout the years, it’s changed. The title has been thrown around with different name changes, but the job has stayed basically the same.”

Streaming the games as a caster, what those in the e-sports community call the commentator, isn’t what attracted Thompson. It’s the community, teamwork, and fun with your friends.

“Community is super important to us at e-sports,” Thompson says. “When you think about video games, everyone’s parents are like, ‘Oh, you’re not learning anything, you’re not going to get anything out of it. You need to be more social.’ But what video gaming has become is the ultimate social platform. We’ve grown so close together just by playing games. We’ve learned to work together as a team to figure out solutions, and I think it’s just become a huge deal in general to the world.”

“We’re a family,” Thompson says. “We stick together, we work together, even when it comes to homework. The people I’ve grown with and became my friends are now helping me with my homework and stuff that would’ve been very hard for me to figure out on my own.”

Hail Berg, a sophomore chemistry major, serves as the president of the e-sports club and describes the e-sports community at Mines as “goofy.”

“There’s a lot of joking, and pretty much everyone with a role in e-sports are all friends,” Berg says. “I am friends with basically everyone in the cabinet and most of the people who work with e-sports, like varsity. I know them very well, and it’s just very together.”

Coming to Mines was an easy decision for Berg because of the university’s chemistry program, but it’s easy to stay because of the connections and friendships made through the e-sports community.

“It is a bunch of nerds, my kind of people,” Berg says.

The e-sports room is open to everyone. That’s how the organization was able to get Divo Cerjan, a geological engineering student from Croatia, in the door. Cerjan didn’t know Mines had an e-sports community until arriving on campus. One day after walking into the

Surbeck Center and talking to members of the club, Cerjan joined on the spot and now serves as the varsity e-sports coordinator overseeing all the competitions.

“When I first joined the club, honestly it helped me make friends and get to know people,” Cerjan says. “It was a really good way of meeting new people because we all had the same interests.”

Like both Berg and Thompson, it is the community that truly makes the e-sports team special.

“Just having people around that you can talk to and always have someone there, I feel like that’s a really cool thing,” Cerjan says.

Another important aspect of the e-sports team is the outreach component. Throughout the year, the organization hosts various events geared towards the general community, such as Grubby Games held every fall.

Grubby Games is a 24-hour LAN party, meaning that people from across the Rapid City community can come together and game at the same time in the same place. There’s a charitable component to this event with money raised going to the Children’s Miracle Network.

The Grubby High School League is an outreach event for high schools in the Black Hills area. The teams that make it to finals play the final match in the Mines e-sports room. This year, they’re playing Valorant, but in previous years they’ve also played League of Legends and Rocket League.

On top of that, e-sports has a presence at every Go To Mines event. This provides an opportunity to get future Hardrockers excited and assures parents that their son or daughter will find a place they fit in because the Mines e-sports community is not only about playing video games in solitude but also building community, teamwork, and friendships

The rise of e-sports is undeniable and the community at Mines is proof of its growing popularity. With the revenue generated from streaming and a sense of camaraderie, it’s no wonder that e-sports is becoming a billion-dollar industry.

So begone those thoughts of students playing video games, sitting in a basement by themselves. The e-sports community at Mines proves that it’s just the opposite.

South Dakota Mines took home first place and four out of five top spots in the student division at the 2023 South Dakota Governor’s Giant Vision Business Competition held in April in Sioux Falls. The competition is highly competitive and is the biggest of its type in the state. Mines students or alumni have received top honors at the competition for ten years in a row.

Mines has taken home first place at every statewide business competition open to university students this year. This includes top honors at University of South Dakota (USD) and Dakota State University (DSU) competitions. In the past nine years, Mines