The rise of competitive gaming has found itself at ACU with the Wildcat E-Sports club.
Wildcat E-Sports covers all the major e-sport video games from League of Legends to Super Smash Bros. Last year, the club focused on trying to expand itself before focusing on the internal aspects of the club, such as player rankings and strengthening the teams. Now that they have all that squared away, the club is ready to create competitive teams to compete against other universities.
“That’s really cool, being able to send people out and get ACU’s name out this way, as it is a new frontier of competition that schools are looking into.” said Jayce Walker, sophomore computer science major from New Braunfels and member of the club.
The club welcomes all who are interested, regardless of previous gaming experience.
“We don’t have any qualifications at the moment, because we are just trying to figure out who is ready to compete competitively and who is not, so anyone can try out,” said Tyler Barfield, junior computer science major from Perryton.
The club tries to host at least one tournament a month for each individual game that is an internal competition to determine student’s rankings for teams.
“We had a tournament style placing, because we had more people than we could have on a team,”said Jessica Wininger, junior digital entertainment technology major from Haslet. “You can only have five players on a team, so of the people who were interested, we had enough spots so that there could be alternates, but we did do a placement testing so that we could figure out who would be starting for us on that week.”
The club is looking forward to what the future brings for them as they have some big tournaments later in the year, Wininger said.
“These tournaments are called ‘The Training Grounds,’ and we are gearing up for the big tournaments that all the big, serious players go. This is a chance for us to have a tournament every weekend and play with other colleges and get experience from that but also make our players better, see where the competition is and where you are at to see if you want to compete in the larger tournaments,” Wininger said.
The club is also putting the finishing touches on their League of Legends team that they are planning on having set up by the end of the semester.
“Competitive League (of Legends) has not started up yet,” Will Solomon, junior management major from Abilene and club president said. “We are still getting some stuff figured out, but that should be starting by the end of the semester, with the season starting in February.”
The club would love for people to check them out. “We have a place that you can look into the times at ACU League of Legends group on Facebook or Wildcat E-Sports on Facebook as well, and we can get you more information that way,” Walker said.
