This year, the E-sports Club is streaming their video game competitions live on Twitch.
The E-sports Club planned on streaming their games ever since they received a computer lab last year, but were unable to follow through due to “teething problems,” according to Jonathan Clarke, science teacher and club sponsor.
“[Last year] we had difficulty getting set up,” Clarke said. “But this year everything’s ready to go, we’re starting to get more organized [and] we’ve expanded a few different avenues.”
These new avenues include an official website, an account on X, and now, a Twitch channel to stream the team’s competitions, which was “the next logical step,” according to Clarke.
“I realized [that] we needed to get more exposure,” Clarke said. “We want to try and showcase what we do and get people more interested.”
During an online video game tournament, players will have their gameplay streamed onto Twitch and commentated over by other E-sports club members, such as Nathan Kowitt, junior.
“Nathan’s just been a pretty good role model in the group,” Clarke said. “Sometimes players can be quite insular [and] just talk to their teams, but Nathan was not one of those, and I thought he’d be a good fit [for commentating streams].”
As a commentator, Kowitt faced some difficulty, especially when covering the video game Valorant, a game he was not proficient in.
“I actually had no idea what goes on in Valorant,” Kowitt said, “[commentating] was sitting alone in an empty room by myself for three hours without any idea what was going on.”
According to Travis Ngo, freshman and fellow E-sports commentator, Kowitt improved his skills over time, thanks in part to Ngo’s extensive knowledge of Valorant.
“Travis gave me some pointers,” Kowitt said. “When I’m [streaming] by myself, it’s really difficult, [but] Travis makes it easy. When Travis is there, [commentating is] so entertaining.”
According to Ngo, the most important aspects of commentating video games is “to be funny, and know how to play the game.”
Clarke hopes that in the future other programs besides E-sports will adopt streaming.
“I think a big opportunity that we’re missing here at the moment is that we have a lot of sports and a lot of activities inside this building that we don’t showcase as well as we could,” Clarke said. “I think there’s plenty of opportunities for us to do things like have student commentators for basketball games or dance competitions to give us more exposure and get us more connected.”
