At Fremd High School, there are many different activities and sports for students to participate in such as baseball, basketball, football, Model UN, debate, Speech Team, and more. All of these clubs demonstrate life skills that are essential in the real world such as teamwork, communication and strategy. There is a new club at Fremd encouraging these same skills: the eSports club, created  by Sophomore Sean Kim and Junior Nick Seroni and sponsored by technology coordinator Keith Sorensen.

With a turnout of over 90 students at the first meet, it was primed to be a huge success. Many students joined this club because they saw an opportunity they just could not miss out on: playing video games at school while hanging out with their friends.

Freshman Sebastian Lekus, an avid gamer, explains his reasoning about why he joined this very exciting club.

“When I was 5 years old, I became an avid gamer because I saw video games as an opportunity to have fun and play with my friends.” Lekus said. “Now when Fremd decided to have this club, I thought, well I like video games, if I can convince my friends to do it, then we will have a great time.”

Although the eSports Club’s main purpose is to play video games, it offers much more than that.

Sophomore, and one of the head creators, Sean Kim describes his main intentions of creating the club.

“We wanted to create an eSports scene in high school where people can socialize and have fun with each other,” Kim said. “In addition, one of the main purposes of this club is to attempt to connect these people into a community of other video gamers and just enjoy themselves.”

In this club, there are a variety of video games played such as League of Legends, Super Smash Bros, Hearthstone, and CS:GO.

Kim details the specific reasons as to why he picked out these certain games.

“We focus around these games because they already exist in other eSports Leagues and these games have humongous scenes,” Kim said. “Although we are having an issue with CS:GO duty to its M rating, we are working on a fix for it at the moment. In addition to these games, we want to add another game with the same humongous scenes such as Star Craft. We are working on expanding this to a wider variety, but need some time before we can implement them.”

Out of all of these games, the general consensus is that either League of Legends or CS:GO is the most popular game out of this bunch.

Freshman Alex Zhen has a different favorite game in mind.

“There are a variety of games to choose from in this club and it’s honestly hard to choose considering any games I have considered competitive and more that I don’t even know could be competitive are choices,” Zhen said. “If I were to choose, I would have to choose the game called Hearthstone, as I feel that it is a very underrated game.”

Playing in a head to head, all out, competitive game against an upperclassmen, or even against someone who has more talent and dedication can be very scary and intimidating.

Kim has seen many people in this club succeed and he has some words of wisdom for those shy gamers.

“If I had to give advice to anyone on succeeding in this club, I would say, just join and have fun, don’t let the name (competitive gaming club) intimidate you,” Kim said.

eSports club is unique because of its mixture of a friendly game of any sport and with a competitive spirit that the academic clubs have to offer. In addition, the Fremd eSports Club is planning a massive inter-high school competition while also working on making it more accessible to students. Currently, they are competing for a $20,000 scholarship prize pool.

Playing video games at school, hanging out with friends, and the opportunity to compete for a $20,000 prize seems like the perfect equation for recruiting players. This is the inaugural year and it is already gaining popularity.

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