Highlander Esports Team Looks to Level Up into Regional Powerhouse

Leaders of NJIT's esports team, which is among the most successful collegiate videogame groups in the region and one of the top programs nationwide at games such as Blizzard Entertainment's Overwatch, said they see the next few years as a time of critical evolution for their two-year-old club and for their field overall.

Their goal mirrors that of college esports teams everywhere — to be accepted on equal standing with traditional sporting programs such as basketball and football. It's not unrealistic, they say, noting that many universities especially on the west coast already provide coaches, dedicated playing spaces, scholarships and other trappings normally reserved for physical athletes.

Even the idea that gamers don't need to be fit is changing, NJIT esports president Jira Uttarapong said. Top players need fast-twitch muscles, hand-eye coordination, understanding of team strategy, and the ability to intensely concentrate and ignore outside pressure. She's not suggesting they spend time in the weight room, but that the notion of gaming as the domain of unhealthy introverts is obsolete. Top-tier gaming requires mental conditioning — this isn't just sitting in front of an old Atari.

Top-tier gaming requires mental conditioning — this isn't just sitting in front of an old Atari.

Uttarapong, a senior computer science major from Millburn, helped organize the group from several predecessor organizations after she transferred from Union County College for the fall 2017 semester. She discovered that the NJIT gaming scene was vibrant but unstructured, and set out to help change it. Initially she was one of the club's only women, but more joined after seeing that she was well-respected by the male players. She competes at Riot Games' League of Legends on a PC, but her favorite game for personal fun is Nintendo's Chrono Trigger.

In addition to Overwatch and League of Legends, other team members compete at Call of Duty (Activision), Fortnight (Epic Games), Hearthstone (Blizzard), Rainbow Six Siege (Ubisoft), Rocket League (Psyonix), Street Fighter V (Capcom) and Super Smash Bros. (Nintendo).

"I think esports is a really wonderful thing to have in the collegiate spare. I'm really passionate about this club," Uttarapong said. Currently she's channeling her passion into getting the group its own space on campus, so that players don't have to lug their tower computers to practice sites or store them temporarily in an office meant for other purposes. Her energy was evident to Blizzard Entertainment, which sent her and 17 other students across the U.S. and Canada to a leadership retreat at its Irvine, Calif. headquarters last summer.

Faculty adviser D.J. Kehoe, who teaches game development in the Ying Wu College of Computing and is also an alumnus, grew up gaming on an Intellivision console and his Commodore 64 computer. Now he's in discussions with the university athletics department to get more support for the esports team. "It helps that the esports industry is starting to out-gross a lot of traditional sports," he observed. "The U.S. is kind of late to the party when it comes to mainstream support of spectating and competing at these games."

"I grew up in a sports family and I could never understand it," Kehoe said of their fandom. But then he discovered videogame spectating, where he felt much more at home. "I started watching my people," he joked. Until he approached age 40 last year, Kehoe offered his students extra credit if they could beat him at Bandai Namco's Tekken martial arts game. Retirement came when reaction times slowed and students started winning.

In other parallels to traditional sports, Uttarapong said players must maintain a 2.5 grade-point average and that some of the club's teams hold organized practices and game-play meetings for several hours each week. Kehoe added that professional gaming even has a doping issue, with players having been caught using Adderall to gain a competitive edge in concentration.

The team is hosting an event on April 5 in the Wellness and Events Center. Game play and technical presentations are on the agenda. Regional competitors such as Seton Hall, Rutgers, and Montclair State are invited.

From 8-bit games of the 1970s through 64-bit games today, many a programmer got started as a child with a joystick in their hands – it's a healthy and fun way to learn decision-making, problem-solving, and systems analysis skills. It led Uttarapong to use game data as an information source for artificial intelligence research, she said.

"So many people play games and they're inspired to go into programming, design or art," Kehoe observed. "Gaming is a gateway drug to computing as a whole."