Livingston claims Esports championship

Chance Benningfield, Brayden Vickery and Tristen Deramus (l-r) of Livingston High School won the Hudson Esports Spring Invitational. (Right) Livingston ISD takes home this unique trophy for the championship at the Hudson Esports Spring Invitational. Courtesy photos

From Enterprise Staff

With a goat trophy to show off all their hard work, the Livingston Esports team won the Hudson Spring Invitational championship over six other schools, including Rusk, Jasper, Central, Big Sandy, Elkhart and Hudson.

For those new to the term, Esports is short for electronic sports, a form of competition using video games that has an estimated worldwide audience of 454 million viewers. The game played by the high school students is Rocket League, and requires critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity from players to achieve and sustain success. It is a sport-based game that can be described as soccer with cars. It features a competitive game mode based on teamwork and outmaneuvering opponents.

Livingston’s Team Superbia is comprised of LHS students Brayden Vickery, Tristen Deramus and Chance Benningfield.

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“I am beyond ecstatic at my team’s performance,” Edgar Guevara, the team’s coach said. “We said we were definitely coming back this year and we knew we had a good chance to take first, but I never expected us to dominate in the way that we did. Our team came back extra motivated after last year’s loss and really shut things down this year. I’m really proud of how far they’ve come as a team.”

The coach said that due to extracurricular activities, jobs and differing schedules, the team was not able to practice together often. There was an attempt at an afterschool Esports club for practice every day, but Guevara said it never fully took off. The team did run practice drills individually at home whenever free time allowed. They practiced as a team a little under a month before the tournament.

The tournament was a little longer than six hours, split into a round-robin phase and an elimination phase. Livingston won most round-robin matches by a landslide, taking only one loss against Hudson. Stephen F. Austin State University’s varsity team took notice of how dominant Livingston was in the round-robin phase and challenged them to an exhibition match. Livingston accepted, and though they lost 2-0, it allowed the team to showcase their skills against a college team.

During the elimination phase, Livingston went undefeated against all teams and reached the finals against Hudson’s Team Venom. Determined to take home the trophy, Livingston won all three matches in a best-of-five series for the championship.

“The world of Esports is a growing field, with not only many lucrative job opportunities, but also college scholarship opportunities,” Guevara said. “The GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs) team is always looking for ways to provide opportunities to advance our students’ interests.”