The Esports Weekly Wrap-up: Oct 29th – Nov 4th
Amelia Green, Summer Muster Oct 29th, 2023
Now that we are into our sixth week of the season, there are some interesting events our team would like to share with you! To begin with our Rocket League team, we saw an intense fight from our Varsity Vandals against the Boise’s Blue team that unfortunately ended in our loss. However, this was still a very impressive showing from our team as the Boise Esports is well-renowned, and we pushed them into a 0-0 OT in the first game of the series. The final series score was 0-3 for the Broncos, but our performance was nothing to sneeze at! Our JV Team will be discussed in the highlights!
Tuesday was going to be a rather busy day for our Esports Staff with League of Legends, Overwatch 2, and a Smash Bracket, but things didn’t quite as planned on our Halloween Event Night. The League match against Bellevue University was forfeited by the Bellevue Bears. This leaves us with that last win before the playoffs next week! Overwatch 2 was also forfeited by our opponents, MSMU’s Purple team. This boosted our Overwatch League score to 2 wins and 4 losses. On the other hand, the Smash Bracket went swimmingly! Lots of amazing battles played out as many of our competitors valiantly fought through the ranks! While our varsity team also competed in the bracket, it was mostly composed of Vandals in the area that were showed up. Our final winner was varsity player Asdagigafo, finishing the final round as his main, Meta Knight!
Following Tuesday’s fun-filled activities, Wednesday gives our Vandals a match against University of Guam’s B Team, the Tritons! Ultimately, we believed that we would prevail due to previous experience with this school, comparative rankings, and in-game rankings. Previously, our Vandals matched against their A Team and won by a big margin, and we believed that something similar would occur in this match-up. The B Team had the same rankings as the A Team, 5th in the league with 1 win and 4 losses, so we had much the same expectations for them. There was also a large discrepancy in the in-game rankings of individual competitors skewing in-favor of the Vandals. In the end, our predictions were proven correct, but the Tritons put up a rather fantastic fight through the entire match! It was wonderful to watch as they kept up their aggression and claimed a few rounds for themselves! The final score was 2-0 for the match-up. The first game ended 13-1, and the second game ended 13-2. It was an impressive showing from our Vandals!
Thursday’s Smash games against Stone Child College were cancelled, and the Vandals won by forfeit. Stone Child couldn’t make the attempted 5pm reschedule, so the JV and Varsity split into teams and ran doubles the rest of the night. CS2 was up Friday, scrimming against a team called Zen Garden. They were originally going to play New Mexico this week, but the game was rescheduled to last Wednesday, the 25th. Zen Garden contains two prospective UofI students, who go by LoafCat and Auti__. The team brought some serious heat, taking us down 0-2. The scrim gave our team some practice on some familiar maps, and a tough opponent with a little less pressure. They’ll be up against Cal State San Marcos and Covid Poly Pamona next week on the 9th and 10th, respectively.
HIGHLIGHTS
First off, Our JV Rocket League Vandals! Our JV series against the Montana Tech Orediggers was just as riveting as the varsity game! 3 of the 4 games went into OT from how fierce each side was competing, ultimately ending in a series score of 3-1. Exemplary performances all around as the Vandals didn’t let up the pressure and maintained lines of communication. Rocket League concluded the night with beautiful plays executed flawlessly!
Now that LoL’s regular season is over, we have been scheduled for our first play-off game! How exciting! It is going to be held on Nov 7th at 5:30 PM PST. We’ll be going up against the Southern Miss Clothing Academy’s Golden Eagles. Make sure to join us then to begin a wonderful tournament!
NEXT WEEK’S SCHEDULE
Monday, Nov 6th: Rocket League – Vandals VS GFU @ 7:00 PM, Vandals VS NMSU @ 8:00 PM, and Vandals VS Redlands @ 9:00 PM
Tuesday, Nov 7th: Overwatch 2 – Vandals VS Colorado College @ 7:00 PM, LoL Playoffs- Vandals VS Southern Miss Academy @ 5:30 PM
Wednesday, Nov 8th: Valorant – Vandals VS Colorado School of Mines JV @ 7:00 PM
Thursday, Nov 9th: Smash – Vandals VS SAIT Trojans @ 7:00 PM, CS 2 – Vandals VS CSUSM Blue @ 7:00 PM
Friday, Nov 10th: CS 2 – Vandals VS Covid Poly Pomona Green @ 7:00 PM
Join us on our Twitch, @UIdahoEsports, and view games live and previous ones you may have missed! You can also join us in-person in the Esports Lab at the basement of the Pitman Center! We stream every week. GO VANDALS!
Thank you for reading!