Besides offering two intercollegiate varsity teams in esports — the competitive playing of video games — Champlain College also offers club-level esports teams. All of the teams at both levels are highly ranked, and they all have a new place to compete and practice on Lakeside Avenue in Burlington.
Champlain’s newly-opened esports arena has more than two dozen PC stations, a dedicated training room and a full broadcasting suite for live-streaming on Twitch and elsewhere. A senior on the varsity team for Valorant, a first-person shooter game, has watched the program come a great distance in a short time.
“I was on the team when it was just a small club team when we all played remote, and to see it grow to be this program over a year has been incredible,” Sebastian Meredith said. “I grew up watching some games — watching my friends play games — never thought that I would be playing in such an environment where I would have coaches and managers and people looking at everything I’m doing.”
One of the people looking at everything Meredith is doing in a coaching capacity recently graduated from Champlain. The college has offered a four-year academic program in video game development since 2004.
“A lot of our players are actually from our game development program,” 2022 Champlain graduate Charlie Kowalski said. “Me myself, I was a game programmer here at the college. It’s really a good way to get people into the school, and it’s kind of a no-brainer. We’re a game development, game-focused school. To have our biggest sport be esports, it’s kind of a perfect mix.”
Champlain’s director of esports was studying for a Master’s in Fine Arts a few years ago. He was one of the first people to recognize that varsity esports would be a natural fit on campus.
“We petitioned to make it happen, but five years ago, the landscape was very different,” Champlain esports director Christian Konczal said. “I think there were maybe three or four programs happening at that time, and now there’s over 200, 250.”
This past spring semester, Champlain officially became one of those competitive programs. The student-led effort to reach that point was nearly a decade in the making.
“I’m just so inspired by their leadership,” Champlain president Alex Hernandez said. “They really created and bought this whole esports arena and program to life. We’re going to welcome people from the community and I think it’s just going to be a real jewel for our state.”
President Hernandez helped open the arena on Thursday by playing what he said was his first esports match. He defeated student government president Martina Monroe in a game of Rocket League, which is the other video game in which Champlain competes at the varsity level.
If you want to watch Champlain Esports compete, you can do so on the program’s Twitch channel. One of the videos you’ll find there shows Hernandez’s and Monroe’s Rocket League match in its entirety.
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