I’ve Been Competing in a High School Esports League During Lockdown
Esports have provided some of the last remaining team competition during quarantine. Photo: Marco Verch
By HONGBIN PAN
The atmosphere is tense.
Four players from Midwood have already been eliminated by the enemy team and are now out for the round. The Hornets’ last remaining player is attempting to claw back a round against five rivals from West De Pere High School in Green Bay, Wisconsin. This is known as a clutch round, where one team is down in numbers. It is one of many rounds in the game of Counter-Strike, a team-based, tactical first-person shooter.
Midwood has its very own Counter-Strike team currently competing in the High School Esports League, an esports tournament with over a hundred high schools across America. I am one of the players playing for Midwood during the coronavirus quarantine, in the league’s spring tournament.
First, let’s go back a few months to the creation of the Midwood team. It was late August, and the new school year was just around the corner. I had seen an ad online about the High School Esports League and told my friend Raf about it. We thought it would be interesting to see how we would do, competing against other high schoolers. We also liked the idea of representing Midwood at the same time.
We laid out a plan of action on how we would get this idea approved. We figured that the team had to take the form of a club, so we met with Mr. Lawrence Kolotkin, Midwood’s Coordinator of Student Activities, and started looking for teachers who could be our club advisor. After some time, we found our advisor, history teacher Mr. Christopher Eisenhardt.
The approval process took longer than we expected, so we didn’t make it in time to join the fall season tournament. However, when the team finally got approved in early March, we made it just in time to register for the spring season. We originally intended on registering teams for other games as well, not just for our game, Counter-Strike, but these plans got cut short by COVID-19. After we had assembled a full team of five, the school paid our entry fees and our spring season in the High School Esports League officially began.
Going into the season, I had great confidence in our team. Though we may not have had a star-studded roster, we were still determined to put in the hours to practice and get better. In Counter-Strike, strategy, teamwork, and communication are easily the most important parts of the game. So during the preseason, we started by brainstorming all our strategies and laying out everyone’s roles. We practiced with scrimmages against other teams in the league; these are matches that don’t count towards the team’s official record.
We went all in and challenged the best team in the league, last season’s champions, to a practice match. The match ended as expected. It was a completely one-sided win for the defending champs. The end score was 16 rounds to our pitiful five. This match showed us the kind of teams we were truly up against. We told ourselves that if we wanted to win the entire tournament, we would need to be as good as them. Instead of being discouraged by the loss, we picked ourselves up and were more motivated than ever to keep practicing.
We started running daily practices from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. If there was a silver lining to the coronavirus outbreak for us, it was that we got more time to practice, now that we are home all day. After a week of practice, the regular-season matches finally started. These official matches are played once per week, and a team’s win-loss record at the end of eight weeks determines whether or not they qualify for the playoffs. In our first week, we went against a clearly inexperienced team and won by a perfect 16 rounds to zero. But we didn't let our guard down. We knew we would eventually face better teams, so we kept practicing.
In our second week, we faced a slightly better team but still won 16-6. In our third week, we took our first loss against a much better team, but luckily everyone stayed positive and we didn’t lose motivation. In our fourth week, we faced another inexperienced team and beat them 16-2.
It was in our fifth week that we took our second loss. We made too many mistakes and fell 16-9. This loss was devastating because it was the last loss we could take if we wanted to make the playoffs. Teams need a record of at least six wins to two losses over the season to qualify, and now we already had the last loss we could afford to take. We would have to win all of our next three matches to have a chance at the playoffs. There was absolutely no room for mistakes.
That night, after the game, we went over a recording of the match and discussed what we did wrong and how we could improve. A week later, we took home a convincing 16-4 victory, bringing our overall record to 4-2. At the time of writing this, we are currently three days away from our seventh week match. We are working just as hard as ever, balancing our schoolwork and our practice hours. Maybe Team Midwood will pick up a trophy in June. Who knows.
Regardless, after this quarantine is over, we hope to expand Midwood’s esports team so that many more students can have a chance to compete. We are looking to have teams for other games like League of Legends, Overwatch, Rainbow Six Siege, and more. Many other high schools across America have already competed in the High School Esports League for years now, but this is only Midwood’s first year competing, and I’m excited to see what the future holds.