With judges listening in, 22 players demonstrate their skill and teamwork in hopes of securing one of the 15 limited spots of the three Klein esports teams. On Jan. 7, the esports club began their team tryouts for Valorant, one of the main games the club frequently plays. 

Esports involves teams that play video games competitively in a sports environment either for money or for the improvement of skill and the game. 

In the world of esports, the tryouts are held differently than most clubs, as the tryouts took place online at the individual player’s homes. The teams would sign up for a timeslot between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. and in their teams of five, would join a voice call with the judges. 

“The judges would sometimes join [the call] to see how they were communicating with each other, because in Valorant, communication with your team is really important,” esports Reporter Ansley Brown said. “We would judge them based off of how they were communicating and also based off of the characters that they would play.” 

In a team game like Valorant, it is important that a player knows how to make their character’s abilities work well with other characters to optimize performance. Because of this, there needs to be a balance in the number and the types of specialized characters on each team.

“Valorant is part of a genre where you have different characters who are intentionally designed to fill specific roles in a team,” esports President Alfred Atkinson said. “They’re organized on how well teams would work together, and how well people are fulfilling roles.”

In total, the esports club had three different Valorant teams that players were trying to get into. These include the Gold team, the highest ranked team, the Blue team, the second highest ranked team, and the White team, which is the third highest ranked team. 

“Deciding the gold team was easy, but deciding the blue and white team was the hard part,” Brown said. “We actually had a second round on Saturday, the day after, for the blue and white team. We made a rough draft [of the teams], and we made them play against each other to see if they worked well with the team that we had made for them. I think a few people did get changed around, but after the second round, it was more clear who needed to be on which team.”

With the success of the Valorant tryouts, the club hopes to create teams for other games, including Overwatch and Super Small Brothers Ultimate in the future. With these teams, the club’s goal is to show what they’re truly capable of despite their weaknesses.

“I would eventually like to get to the point where we can have teams that really do strive to just win things and not sort of be in it for the social aspect because for me, the biggest part about esports is just that journey of self improvement,” Atkinson said. “I think having this club be a possible medium for people to explore, that would be really great. That’d be my dream for this club.”