WPU esports adds Smashbros

By Elijah Horman

WPU esports has been an integral part of our school for the past few years. This year WPU had the inaugural season for our Super Smash Bros Ultimate (SSBU) team.

Though this is the first season for the team, they are already competing at a high level and have had several tournaments in the past few weeks with one more upcoming before the end of the year.

Looking forward, the team will be hosting an intrasquad tournament in the simulation and game design lab (Pressley 301) on April 20. The team will be competing, but the tournament will also be open to the student body as a whole. The team hopes that this will provide good practice while also introducing the sport to new people.

Most recently, two WPU players, Nathan Hawxwell (Hawx) and Donolique Tyrell (Leek) competed in an invitational tournament at NC State. This tournament invited the top players from a large selection of schools from across the state.

This tournament began with a round robin style of play. Each participant was placed into a pool and then competed against each other member in that pool in five total rounds. These results would then be used to seed the single elimination bracket.

Unfortunately, once the final bracket started both of our players were eliminated in the first round. Despite this both players had an optimistic outlook about the future of the program.

To be in the first season of competition and already competing at a high level is an extremely good sign for the team.

The team also recently competed at Playthrough gaming convention, the biggest gaming convention in Raleigh on March 18.

This tournament’s style was a double elimination bracket meaning that at first seeds are entirely random, and each competitor can lose twice before being eliminated from the tournament. The event started with 80 participants in a single bracket. After the first round of matches anyone who lost was moved to a separate losers bracket. Players who fall to the losers bracket still have a chance to win first place, they just can’t lose again once being placed in the bracket.

For this tournament all rounds were conducted best two out of three until the top 8 which were played best three out of five. In addition to this, once the top eight were decided the competition moved to the main stage area to be viewed by the rest of the convention. Notably there was a $500 prize pool for this event distributed between the top four finishers.

In the first round WPU took two wins and two loses with Hawxwell and Jared Howard (FLD_Bluejay) emerging victorious from their matches. Despite skilled gameplay, Tyrell and Steven Miles (St3v3n) were moved to the losers bracket.

In round two, Howard continued his winning streak remaining in the winners bracket, but the remaining of our competitors took a loss. This knocked Tyrell and Miles from the tournament.

According to Hawxwell, who competed and is a coach for the team. “All of the players are improving a lot and we’re starting to see the results.”