Move over athletics, Durango High School launches esports – The Journal

Students compete against other high schools in western Colorado to crown the best gamers

Some sports use brute force, some use finesse and some use … a joystick? That’s the case for Durango High School’s recently added esports team.

On Wednesday, students mashed buttons on a Nintendo Switch while competing against Windsor Charter Academy in an online Super Smash Bros match. The match consists of three players playing three battles.

For years, high school athletics has been dominated by team sports such as football basketball, soccer and baseball. But with growing interest from students in online gaming and the skills students can gain from working as a team, esports has grown into a statewide phenomenon with over 100 high school esports teams in Colorado.

Ryan Knorr, athletic director and activities coordinator Durango School District 9-R, said the esports team is a great way for students to become involved in a team-setting while participating in something they enjoy.

“It’s just student engagement and trying to work with students who otherwise wouldn’t necessarily see being a part of a team as a positive thing or something that they would want to do,” he said.

Knorr was exposed to esports through the Colorado High School Activities Association and the idea was supported by Superintendent Karen Cheser based on positive experiences she had with esports programs at her former school district.

Students compete remotely, eliminating the need to travel to play other schools. Knorr said this helps with the travel budget and allows students to compete despite living in a remote location.

Team lead Roxie Mitchell said the team plays eight matches against schools across Western Colorado and a two-week playoff to crown the champion. There is both a fall and spring season for esports with a larger emphasis on the spring championship.

Mitchell is a digital photography teacher at DHS with previous teaching experience in video game design, making her the perfect candidate to run the team.

“I just kind of enjoyed working with that group of kids and had been kind of bummed out for years there wasn’t something in our school like a club,” she said.

Mitchell said she is amazed at how fast esports has grown. She said some students just like to play video games and others want to pursue careers in game design. The different career paths video game design and programming present was a factor in the school district promoting gaming.

“This kind of helps them gain a better literacy and more skills that might be applicable to those areas,” Mitchell said.

The students play Super Smash Bros on a monitor inside the counseling office and Rocket League is played in the computer lab on PCs. Mitchell said students have an interest in being spectators for esports matches, and the school district is looking for ways to accommodate the gaming spaces for audiences. Accommodations could come in the form of using the multipurpose room or using different streaming platforms so students can tune in online.

Rotation is something the Super Smash Bros team is still evaluating. There are four members on the team, so one player may not game on a given day based on the match up.

“The last couple weeks came down to the last game,” Mitchell said. “We won the last one but there’s a lot of pressure.”

Not only is rotation important but so is scouting the opposing team. Using the platform PlayVS, the team is able to see opposing players’ stats in order to rate the toughness of their opponent. Using those stats, Mitchell decides which gamer match up she wants.

She said the Rocket League players use the service to evaluate match ups for the week because they do not have an extra player. Mitchell said athletes in other sports have also shown interest in playing esports.

“There was one student on Rocket League who went to his esports practice the other day and then went to basketball practice after,” Mitchell said.

DHS sophomore gamer Benen Lee said he wasn’t interested in video games until he watched his father play War Frame, a third-person role-playing game, but now he has aspirations of becoming a professional gamer and pursuing a career in video game design.

Lee has started learning Python, a game-development program, at DHS.

“Game design really interests me because I’ve watched a YouTuber who’s done it before and I find it interesting,” he said.

While Lee competes by playing Super Smash Bros, he is also interested in playing Valorant at a professional level. Valorant is a free-to-play first-person hero shooter game released in 2020 for PC.

He said there are different strategies the team uses when playing Super Smash Bros. For example, certain players may counter-pick characters when playing the game. When another player picks a character in the game, DHS players often choose a character whose abilities would most likely defeat the opponent’s character.

“If you can get into a specific combo by using an ability, it can help. But a lot of the time we pick characters we are comfortable with,” Lee said.

Often, the players will use the same characters because they know to use their different abilities to win a match.

Lee wants to become a professional gamer but understands the difficulty. He said the benefit of DHS starting a team is that it allows gamers to be recognized for their talents, creating opportunities to become professionals.

“Starting an esports league in high school is good because it allows those searching for new up-and-comers to sign them before they give up on the idea of becoming a pro,” he said.

Knorr has enjoyed the excitement gaming has brought to students and is shocked by the amount of collaboration students do.

While it may be an individual game, he says the players are constantly giving each other tips and tricks to gain an advantage over the other team.

“It’s just neat to see video games bringing our students together,” he said.

tbrown@durangoherald.com