Students shape skills, dreams at esports competition

Correspondent photo / Sean Barron Zander Thornton, left, and Thatcher Rodgers, both from Warren G. Harding High School, compete in the online game called “Overwatch 2” during an esports tournament Tuesday at Ursuline High School in Youngstown, which hosted the event.
YOUNGSTOWN — Having a career in designing video games is a long-term ambition for Devon Hineman-Haak, though he didn’t seem to mind taking a few hits along the way.
“I want to be a game designer, which is part of the reason I joined this class,” Hineman-Haak, a Trumbull Career and Technical Center senior said.
The class he was referring to is made up of fellow esports students, several of whom were competing in such an in-person tournament Tuesday afternoon at Ursuline High School, which hosted the competitive, computer-centered matches.
Also competing in the event, which is part of the rather new Steel Valley Esports League, were students representing Warren G. Harding High School.
“I have always liked (video) games my whole life; they’re fun, even if I lose,” Hineman-Haak said, adding that he hopes to attend Kent State University at Trumbull after graduating high school.
Sharing a similar interest in all things videogames was Dante DeGennaro, an Ursuline High freshman, against whom Hineman-Haak was competing in one called Super Smash Brothers Ultimate, a crossover fighting game launched in 2018 in which players control one of various characters and attack opponents, knocking them out of an arena. The game also offers a variety of modes in which players can operate.
“I really like video games and have been playing them my whole life,” said DeGennaro, who listed science as his favorite subject and whose career goal is to one day be a marine biologist.
The other game that was part of Tuesday’s tournament was “Overwatch 2,” a first-person shooter game that was released in August 2023, and is played with two teams of five.
In the combat game, teams, in essence, vie for control of a robot that moves a payload to an opponent’s side of a map as quickly as possible, Greg Sauline, Ursuline High’s head esports coach, said. One of the game’s many features is a contest to capture several different points.
“When you play three to five games, each game might have a different perspective,” he said in outlining one of Overwatch 2’s complexities.
Esports, which has blossomed in high schools during the past 10 years, offers students opportunities to challenge one another online and, in tournaments such as Tuesday’s, meet others, Sauline said, adding that his team is made up of 15 or 16 students.
Thirty-nine students comprise Harding High’s Esports team, Kevin Koncsol, the team’s head coach and an information-technology specialist for the Warren City Schools, said.
This is the school’s second year in the Steel Valley Esports League, before which was a pilot season that, among other things, included a series of practices for interested students, Koncsol said, adding that his students were in a best-of-five “Overwatch 2” competition Tuesday.
The benefits to participating in esports competitions are many, including giving students another avenue to develop higher-thinking skills, along with encouraging teamwork, since they are “working as a unit,” Sauline explained.
Even though a typical esports competition may lack the large audience of a football game or other physical sporting event, it still gives students a feeling of achievement, a sense that they contributed to their school and “the thrill of a win,” he continued.
In addition, esports holds the potential to teach or reinforce in its adherents the value of certain life lessons such as working hard, making an effort to attain a goal and being persistent — regardless of students’ athletic abilities — Sauline said.
An additional advantage for students in esports is that an increasing number of colleges are providing scholarships to those who desire to play at a collegiate level. Unlike applying for a football scholarship, for example, esports students don’t have to be “the best of the best” to earn one, he added.