Daytona State College Wins National Esports Tournament

The Daytona State College esports team won the fall 2024 national championship last week, in which students competed over the game Rocket League. The victory took place on Friday, in which DSC students bested their opponents from North Carolina’s Wake Technical Community College. The DSC team took a best-of-five match against Wake Tech with three wins to one, clinching their second title in the last two semesters. The team was made up of students Connor Dagel, Tyler Knight, Antony Polinsky, Brady Stroud, and Donald Walton. The esports program at Daytona State College was added as an intercollegiate sport for the 2023-24 school year, with Marine veteran and Full Sail University alum Sebastian Morales being hired as esports coordinator. According to a release on the addition by DSC, esports “requires a tremendous amount of critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity from players to achieve and sustain success”.  As of now, the DSC esports team competes in four games: Valorant, Overwatch 2, Rocket League, and Super Smash Bros. Esports as a college sport has been around since 1972, when Stanford University in California started playing the game ‘Spacewar!’ on an early computer model called a PDP-1, with a year-long subscription to Rolling Stones magazine as the prize. It quickly gained popularity in Asia, before soon becoming a growing form of competition in the United States. The International Olympic Committee in 2024 formed the Olympic Esports Games, with the inaugural tournament to be held in Saudi Arabia next year.