For the past few weeks we’ve covered Esports between two different points of view. First, we addressed the appointed Team’s point of view. Where they explained how they came to be on the team and why they would follow Coach Sides to the ends of the earth. Then we covered Winthrop’s gamers club, their passion for the games, their newly found community and their love for the E-sport [pun intended].
Now we get to take a look into the world and headspace of the big man himself; Coach Joshua Sides. Joshua Sides, who started the Esports team at St. Ambrose University located in Davenport,IA is now he is here at Winthrop University to help start our team. Sides really enjoys coaching Esports for Winthrop. In fact, he loves it. “I love coaching here for a number of reasons. For one, this area is very near and dear to me. Outside of my time at St Ambrose, I’ve lived my entire life in the Carolinas and I love it here. I also think the leadership group at Winthrop is among the best I’ve worked with in my entire professional life, they are a very passionate group. It’s also great to be able to have access to some great NCAA D1 coaching minds, like Coach Kelsey for example, as I am learning the ropes and fresh in the start of my coaching career.”
According to Sides “Esports is competitive gaming, an arena for talented individuals to compete with one another.” Sides also stated that tryouts for Winthrop Students were announced last spring via the allstudents email that informs students daily about the happenings of Winthrop. With no copy of the email, I searched for it but came up empty handed. According to Sides talent is always out there. There is “a pool of talent out there. There are some websites and companies that get students to make profiles, similar to other sports if you’re trying to get recruited you’ll make a profile on a different sites to try and get coaches attention. A lot of it it also through networking, being visible and ametuer leagues playing in highschool, is another way to get noticed, mostly be active in the community. Mostly we when recruit, it’s a lot through social media, discord, through a bunch of different networking platforms defined individuals also using the websites with the profiles and analytics and stuff like that. Going into it we typically benchmark a certain rank as a cut off rank for our tryouts.”
Sides wants to know what players look like on paper, as well as how they react off paper. “What we did for the last tryouts was diamond 2 or higher for League of Legends or 4200 SR or higher for Overwatch and that’s a general like, If i feel like a player’s hit that rank, then they know the basic stuff, their well versed, and I can get them into tryouts and see what I need to see do they have the team work ability? The communication ability? How’s their attitude? Willingness to work with and in a team and what’s their team fit look like? There’s seeing if someone’s mechanically gifted and have the reaction times.”
With Esports doing well in their last few tournaments, and them continuing in the spring, what is a season like for esports? According to Sides, “We have the most irregular regular season that a sport could have. We don’t know what our schedule looks like. We have a general idea of the tournaments we want to compete in, that are yearly and generally consistent. We have tespa and cwall for League of Legends which are in the spring, so we know we’ll have those competitions, but the rest are just fill in the blanks. The competitions that are offered basically the schedules so impossible to pin down, I feel the frustration from the people that design the website, because I can’t give them a these days, these opponents schedule. Basketball could give you a schedule for the next three years or whatever, all the other sports could to some degree give you their next year or two schedules. I couldn’t give you our schedule for the next two weeks. We just don’t know a competition could come up next weekend, probably won’t, but it could, and we’d compete. It’s just impossible to have a solid written out schedule.”
With a season so irregular, the hope is to expand the teams skillsets and add more players to its toolbelt. Sides said, “ We are looking at opportunities to bring in or to improve the team for the spring, we’re not going to go out for the sake of bringing people in. But if the right people come along we would definitely consider it, for the fall we were figuring out what that looks like, do we have the space, are we given the budget to bring in more people for the fall that’s more of a wait and see right now.”
If you are looking for the thrill of traveling and playing esports for Winthrop University, Sides says, “anyone who meets the qualifications should reach out to tryout. Once again Diamond 2 or higher for League of Legends and 4.2k SR or higher for Overwatch. I would be very excited to find out there is a player on campus in the top .1% of rankings of the games we play that somehow missed all of the announcements.” So be sure to look hard for that announcement, and contact Coach Sides via email at sidesj@winthrop.edu or visit his office located upstairs in the bookstore.
