TAKING A GAMBLE ON eSPORTS

Jacob Snover on making one of Central’s newest clubs from a dream to reality

by Sam Elkins content editor

While traditional sports like basketball, football, and soccer have been the norm for high school students, Jacob Snover took a different path and decided to create an esports team. His passion for gaming made him realize the potential for esports could be just as competitive and rewarding as traditional sports.

“[ESports] all started because we wanted to play Rocket League. It’s evolved a lot, it started with just me and a couple buddies as leadership. And now I’ve got freshmen and tons of people who are a part of it and it’s grown monumentally,” Snover states. It began when Snover and some friends were originally talking about Rocket League and watching some matches in Mr. Heethuis’ classroom. Finally, Heethuis played a few matches with Snover after school, and ESports was born. A team quickly assembled to play games and have fun in a competitive school environment, led solely by the students.

As the club evolved, so did Snover’s leadership skills. He faced challenges he wasn’t used to, because as the founder of the club, no one before him had faced the exact same issues. He had to deal with popularity, popularity decline, interest, and loss of interest all at the same time, but Snover still led the club to many victories and beating teams that were thought to be out of their league. “I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Rockford Rams, they have a really good esports program. They have around three dedicated ESports labs in their school and they have a good chunk of their school dedicated to ESports,” he shares. Snover led our team to a victory over Rockford. The computers they used at the time were old and not that great for gaming. Within the past month, Snover was able to help update each of the desktops in the Pub to true gaming PCs and gave the ESports team the equipment they could have only dreamt of in their original founding.

The team has been a great gift for Snover too, not only with the friends made and fun had, but also for his future. “I have a tryout date for Michigan Tech’s Overwatch team, and I’ve been looking there because I’m looking for an engineering school and they are really good at that,” he shares. Snover has already made plans to get to know some of the members when he gets up there and even has been offered a scholarship for his leadership of Centrals Esports team.

Snover’s biggest advice for Central students is to get involved. “A lot of people in the high school level get a lot caught up in the grades, and they spend a lot of their time on that. My advice would be to join a club, whether that’s esports related or not,” Snover advises. “It could be the track team, it could be, just join a community. Get yourself in a community. You’ll have people to go off probably the rest of your life.”

Although he has to leave the team behind, Snover has already trained his replacement. “It’ll give them the opportunity to do the things that I did. I don’t necessarily need my name on it, it’s not my personal project. It’s just a thing I started that I hope the community takes care of when I leave,” Snover reflects. “I was obviously able to do a lot, whether that was setting up the lab or a whole lot of things for the club. I was just a start for future success.” //

WHAT IS ONE THING YOU COULDN’T LIVE WITHOUT?

“My heart, probably. It’s one of the organs that I have. My brain is also pretty important to me.” - Evan

Stegenga

What is your biggest high school pet peeve?

“Lots of workload. No one has time for that.” - Rachael Skrzypczak

“Unnecessary rules, especially for seniors. It’s usually just a waste of time, like putting phones in the sleeves. I don’t use my phone during class, but it just annoys me that I have to do that just because a bunch of underclassmen use their phones in class.”

- Emmet Payette

“Freshman year: New Sophomore year: Comfortable

Junior year: Developmental

Senior year: Last Leg”

- Ian Elder

How would you describe each year of high school in one word?

“Freshman year: Scary

Sophomore year: Interesting

Junior year: Tough

Senior year: Fun”

- Ethan Gould

WHAT IS THE MOST MEMORABLE THING FROM HIGH SCHOOL?

“This one bus driver I had that was horrible everyday. She would scream at people just for having their foot in the aisle, because ‘Oh, I can’t see the back window!’ when she was 70 years old and didn’t have the eyesight to see that back window anyways.”

- Jacob Liss