Esports Gaining Traction at Trinity

By Jackson Beach

It’s a busy Friday in April in the CSI cube. Whirring drills, clanging metal and other miscellaneous sounds of construction pierce the air as engineering students work on various projects. Will Ballengee and Ben Gonzalez stand by patiently with various controllers and cables in hand. They are waiting for the engineering students to clear out the space so they can start playing video games.

Ballengee, a junior studying engineering science, is the president of the Trinity University Gaming Club (TUG). Gonzalez, a junior anthropology major, is the vice president. The two have reserved this space for a “Super Smash Bros. Ultimate” tournament, the sixth in a series of tournaments held biweekly by the club.

Other members of the club and competitors in the event — around 20 people in total — start to trickle in, and everybody lends a helping hand in setting up. In a matter of minutes, they transform the cube into an esports hub.

Rolling desks serve as competitive stations, each fully equipped with monitors, controllers and printouts of the tournament’s rulesets. The large televisions in the room display a digital bracket. There’s even a makeshift casting table, with a pair of headsets connected to a laptop, from which footage of the tournament will be broadcast live.

This is what esports looks like at Trinity, and it’s only the beginning.

The 2018-2019 academic year has been full of firsts for esports at Trinity. Until this year, competitive gaming had more or less remained on the fringes. In hosting this series of “Super Smash Bros. Ultimate” tournaments, TUG is the first student organization to create a consistent structure for esports at Trinity. 

On a larger scale, the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference (SCAC) Esports Showdown, hosted at Schreiner University on April 6-7 this year, marked the second esports conference championship held at the NCAA Division-III level, according to a SCAC press release.

Though TUG now serves as the primary hub for esports at Trinity, it wasn’t conceived with that goal in mind. Gonzalez noted that he and Ballengee had originally founded the club because they enjoyed playing games casually. “Me and my group of friends played games a lot together,” Gonzalez said. “We wanted to start a club both because we thought it’d be fun and because we realized there were enough people who would be interested in something like that.”

Ballengee echoed this sentiment. “We wanted to create a medium for people who play games as a hobby to meet and share the hobby on campus,” he said.

When Trinity received an unexpected invitation to the SCAC esports showdown, the club diverted nearly all its attention to esports in preparation. “Recreational Sports asked us to manage it since they didn’t have that much experience,” Gonzalez said. “So, last fall, we started gathering team captains for our esports teams.”

In pivoting towards esports, TUG has rapidly created a strong community. Rachel Lopez, a junior, is the club’s public relations officer. She noted that, in just a short time, the club has transformed from a small group of friends into a community of over 100 people. “I think it’s a definitive indicator of how times have changed,” Lopez noted. “Gaming is unique to this decade, and I think it’s super cool that this club not only just exists, but also has so much support.”

Chad Conway, a first-year, goes by the tag “Cheddar” and is Trinity’s top-seeded “Super Smash Bros. Ultimate” player. He serves as one of the captains for Trinity’s “Super Smash Bros. Ultimate” team. “I’m really happy to have this [club] for another three years,” said Conway. “I’ve met so many new faces at Trinity. It’s a whole new social network that you can grow from.”

Gonzalez concurred. “It really wasn’t until we started these tournaments this semester that people began to meet up and Smash players who normally just played on their own began to befriend each other,” he said. “I hear all the time of them meeting at each other’s dorms to practice together and just mess around.”

At the SCAC esports showdown, TUG got a closer look at the broader southern collegiate esports community. “We were definitely underdogs,” Gonzalez noted. “Every other school there had an established esports program and some schools even give scholarships to their players.”

Other competitors in the tournament, like Austin College and Colorado College, have structured, funded esports programs that provide students with luxuries like practice facilities and jerseys. Austin College’s esports webpage even features a donation option.

Trinity’s esports program, on the other hand, lacks structural support. Despite being the underdog, Trinity performed well in the tournament overall and even secured first place in the “Super Smash Bros. Ultimate” division.

“It’s invigorating to try and compete and win,” said Conway. “Even when you’re going up against someone who may be better than you, just trying to win and get that accomplishment is really fun.”

The tournament got Trinity players really invested. “It gave everyone a feeling that if we had a little more structure, more practice and more interest from new players, we could really build something here,” Gonzalez said.

Ballengee noted TUG’s potential as well. “Video games are huge,” Ballengee said. “This is a great way for Trinity to recruit students.” He added, “Beyond practicality, it’s also just fun for people who are dedicated to games to be able to play in a competitive environment.”

Ballengee and Gonzalez have big plans for TUG. “First and foremost, we need more support and structure,” Gonzalez said. He believes that further investments in the club will boost its legitimacy and, in turn, attract even more talent. “I know there’s better players on campus,” said Ballengee. “Getting those people interested in being on the team is something I really want. I think it will take us a long way.”

The duo would also like to see more tournaments on campus, especially for other games. Ballengee credited the club’s successes in “Super Smash Bros. Ultimate” to their bi-weekly tournaments. “That tournament brought in so many Smash players,” Ballengee said. “I really want to find a way to do that for other games.”

Now, TUG finds itself at a crossroads. Its founding members will all be graduating next year, and talks about the club’s future are frequent. Though the founders want to keep fostering esports growth, they also want to maintain a space for people who only want to play games casually.

Having spent the past semester focusing almost exclusively on competitive gaming, Lopez and others worry about alienating potential members who are less interested in esports. “We’d really love to have a set of officers running casual events and a set running competitive events, because the people going to one wouldn’t necessarily be taking from the other,” Lopez said.