The eSports industry is on the rise, and Lindenwood decided to formally adopt teams of its own in 2020.

The eSports team recently had a facility built for them on the bottom floor of Spellmann Center. The computer systems have 2080 Supers, Intel i9-9900k CPUs, 144hz monitors and full gaming peripherals provided by Logitech.  

So far, the teams available for students to try out are Overwatch, League of Legends, Rocket League, and Rainbow Six Siege. Jody Beldon is also helping bring in Valorant. Beldon’s a Global Elite CS:GO player who recently swapped to the game and is leading the team starting next year.  

Rank is not inherently the most important thing to teams. Co-captain of the Overwatch team, Amanda Krsul, is an example of that idea in action. She started on the Overwatch team hovering around the silver rank and is now sitting in Masters. She went from just below average to the top 3% of players as a result of good coaching and hundreds of hours being sunk into practicing.  

Lucas Kehoe is one of the League of Legends coaches who sets up scrimmages for the players and does VOD reviews with them. VOD reviews are where coaches sit down with players and review the games they played.

“What we’re looking for mainly is just players who will work well with the other team members,” Kehoe said. “We don’t want somebody who’s going to be butting heads constantly. We want somebody who will sort of communicate and work with the team.”

“Their rank, and even their position isn’t as important as how they work with others.”