Last November, Rob Netolicky, president of the Kirkwood Community College eSports team, said, “Super Smash Bros. is a hugely popular game.” At the time, Netolicky and the eSports club were looking to launch a Super Smash Bros. tournament and a team. Since then, the tournament has now become a reality while the team is a work in progress.
“I believe that the Smash tournament that we had last Wednesday was our very first one that we organized,” said Morgane Jambor, marketing manager for the eSports team, “[W]e reserved the room, we came by… had members bring in two TV’s and then we brought in two [Nintendo] Switches… and cycled through.”
The tournament was held Wednesday, Feb. 19, at the Michael J. Gould Recreation Center. The Rec Center provided the winner with a t-shirt for a prize. The cycle of competitors began with a bracket of 21. The tournament lasted four hours. “It was a long tournament but it was really fun,” said Jambor.
A traditional eSports team may be out of the question for Super Smash Bros. due to the nature of the game being single-player based but that doesn’t mean the game is not in need of a captain. “We’re trying really hard to find a captain. That’s the unfortunate aspect; that we have a lot of members but… they’re not certain they can lead the tournaments,” said Jambor.
Captaincy is decided by nominations within the club, so are other leadership positions. “A new system in place. We never had a voting system, so as of this semester, every spring, we will do staff nominations,” said Jambor. He is in line to become the co-president with Netolicky in the upcoming nominations.
The lack of a leader isn’t slowing them down as Jambor said he wants to encourage more Super Smash Bros. tournaments. “We are hoping to do more tournaments as officers because now that we’ve seen… the results from the last tournament, we wanted to ask if it’s possible to do it once a month,” said Jambor.
Super Smash Bros. isn’t the only game the club has interest in. “Right now, we have Overwatch, and we have interest in other ones. This upcoming semester, we’re hoping to do a Splatoon 2 team, Pokemon one, a Minecraft one, and I’ll be in charge of the Animal Crossing one,” said Jambor.
The eSports club is one short due to the recent event of the League of Legends team “wishing to branch out into their own independent club.”
Categories: Sports
