Spencer Finley (sjf5814@psu) – Politics Editor

Dan Sanford (das6267@psu) – Sports Editor

New and exciting teams have emerged to represent Penn State Behrend this fall. They came to win in team games rising in popularity: video games. The Penn State Behrend Esports League was officially established earlier in the Fall Semester by club manager and advisor Scott Smith, and team captains Jack Golec, Clayton Lau, Tyler Zellers, Ruby Trumer and Connor Proctor. Andy Sit later joined to complete a full line of team captains, one for each game Behrend competes in.

In an interview with Politics Editor Spencer Finley and Sports Editor Dan Sanford, club manager and advisor Smith described his role within the organization as the team’s coordinator.

“I put together the entire program … put together the initial group of students to begin the club,” Smith said. “I help arrange things like practices and coordinate communication between team captains.” 

Smith has a long history in esports; his own humble beginnings of competition began in the Myth World Cup, an international Myth II: Soulblighter competitive event, in 1999. Despite Behrend’s esports division just arriving on the scene and esports’ current level of popularity being rather new, the concept of esports is as old as the games, according to Smith.

“As soon as they put Pac-Man in an arcade room, people wanted to compete for a high score,” Smith elaborated.

Outside of the esports league, Smith has worked in the IT Department at Behrend for the past 21 years as our System Administrator. He first pitched the idea to have an esports club a few years ago before gaining traction on the club during the pandemic. He was responsible for organizing and securing funding for the club, and choosing the equipment that they began with this year.  

Smith, who also advises the more casual Behrend Gaming Club, or BGC, will also be in charge of marketing the esports club for future participants.

“For instance, I presented to a group of high school guidance counselors up here …” Smith said. “We had… 25-30 guidance counselors from the local high schools up here to show them campus, explain the programs, and then you had me come up and speak on the esports program,”

Smith began the club with minimal promotion out of fear that the group would become too popular for its initial accommodation abilities, especially due to the amount of space available for them when they began. 

Now, after a month or two of bouncing around from location to location, including a business lab and a small, stuffy computer lab in Burke, Behrend’s esports team has finally found a permanent home in the lobby of Perry Hall. The former residence hall located up a hill from the Reed Union Building and just west of Senat Hall has been rebranded as the Behrend Esports Lounge, and houses approximately 50 state-of-the-art Alienware computers.

Eventually, though, the club has a second goal to fulfill as a partner to the BGC. “We had people playing a lot of these games as well, but … the problem we ran into was, those students who wanted to participate had to participate in their rooms,” Smith said.

Due to factors such as gaming equipment setups being relatively complicated to move, as well as difficulty in securing an optimal space to play together, students usually would not be able to meet in person to play their games together. The esports club, when fully fledged come Spring 2022, will help serve as an allied club and a branch to the BGC in order to cater to players of these games as a place where they can all play comfortably in the same room.

Currently, Behrend’s Esports League has a total of 47 rostered team members and more than twice as many total club members. Most are members of one of the league’s six teams. Behrend’s esports division in the Eastern College Athletic Conference, or ECAC, competes in six game titles: “Rocket League,” “Super Smash Bros.,” “Overwatch,” “League of Legends,” “Valorant,” and “Madden.”

Generally, the teams have been performing well in their matches; when asked about the performance of the teams, we were told that they were generally performing quite well; through four matches, none of their teams held a losing record.

When asked about future plans for the gaming lounge in Perry Hall, and about the future of the league in general, Smith said that he would like to see Behrend compete in the ECAC’s “Hearthstone” division after hearing people show interest in the game earlier this semester. 

Any way you look at it, esports has planted a sudden and firm foothold in Behrend’s environment, and it has a bright future here.