Athletic teams are not the only competitive extracurricular activities at Niles North. Many students also prove their mettle by competing on the debate team, chess team—and, perhaps most interestingly, the eSports Club. Members sharpen their video-game playing skills on Wednesdays, from 5:30 until 6:00 p.m., in the Professional Development Center, in preparation for regular competitions with other schools. (While students can attend practices in school, it is logistically preferable that they join meetings online from home.)
eSports Club began during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to team sponsor and Niles North Technology Department worker Damani Brown, a student reached out to him about forming the club. “There’s this need to kind of play games and still facilitate competition while remote,” Brown said. “That’s where this kind of sparked.”
Ginelle Lumpkin, of Niles North’s Special Education Department, has been co-coach of the team for two years. She joined the club “to see what the competitive side of gaming is like.”
“I’ve found that there’s a lot more sportsmanship in it than I thought there was,” Lumpkin said. “You see things on YouTube, and, like, on Twitch, and people can get pretty nasty online, but for the school…the teams that I’ve seen, they’ve all been very cooperative, very supportive of each other, and that’s been very fun.”
“I think [the club] gives a space that is more competitive than just playing online with, just, like, random people,” senior and club member Eliot Ferguson said. “I think it facilitates a space where you can focus really hard on improving, whereas you might not if you’re just casually playing at home, alone.”
They added that eSports is “a good way to meet new people. Regardless of [if] those new people aren’t exactly your jam, I think it’s fun to meet new people.”
Unlike other clubs, the eSports Club is not a single unit; it is made up of different teams devoted to playing specific video games, each during a specific season. Brown described the video games that are popular in the club at the moment: “Fortnite, [Super] Smash Bros. Ultimate, Overwatch 2, Valorant…Marvel Rivals is a new game that just kinda popped up. Rivals of Aether—I’m hearing more and more about [that]….Those are the big ones right now.”
The group does not, however, play M-rated games like Call of Duty.
Membership “regularly rotates through around 50 to 70 kids, because we have so many games going on at once,” Brown said. “It’s as if one of our athletics persons, he’s in charge and oversees all of the sports. It’s kind of what’s happening here.”
All students of all grades are welcome to join eSports; experience is not a requirement. Lumpkin herself claims to not be very good at the games played by club members. “You can join [the club] at any skill level,” Lumpkin said.
Nor are members restricted to any particular game team; according to Eliot Ferguson, it is easy to be on the team for one game, then join another, as long as one knows how to play the new game.
Senior Said Zukanovic, who joined eSports this past March, is a team captain. “Currently, I just make sure that everyone knows what they’re doing on the team,” he explains. “I have a training document…that goes over any specific training regimens and schedules that we have.”
Zukanovic has found his position in the club valuable: “I find being in a leadership position gives me [more] confidence in what I’m doing, and I like being in a role where I can empower people and help them do the things that they want to.”
Notably, eSports does currently face some obstacles in how they are able to prepare and improve.
“We would like to have proper physical training regimens, just like VPE, and soccer, and volleyball, and every other sport,” Zukanovic said. However, this has not been possible “due to our status as a club and not an official sport…We’d like to have some more basic physical training, especially since physical training gets us better at the game and in a better mental state, and will allow us to win more, rather than simply doing our typical practice that we may do.”
“Metas,” or rules for how to play online games, can also change quickly, disrupting teams’ strategies. “If you have football, and they decided that, instead of needing…50 yards to get to the end line, they decided to make it 40 instead, that makes it very difficult for teams to practice properly, since strategies they might have been working on, or things they might have been practicing, need to be changed all of a sudden, or just completely thrown out altogether,” Zukanovic explained.
Despite these challenges, however, players like Zukanovic remain enthusiastic about eSports, even as the season winds down with the school year ending. Though some team members will be graduating, Brown said that he keeps in touch with ex-team members, who will sometimes join team meetings to give current eSports players advice. “Alumni are really important, so I always keep in touch with them,” Brown explained.
“I think everyone in the eSports community is very accepting,” Zukanovic said. “As long as you can play the game good, there’s no issue.”
