In the beginning of each school year, students join teams, programs, and clubs at Point Park to get involved. But there’s a thriving program on campus that is not often talked about. 

The Point Park Esports program was founded in the fall of 2021. Director and Head Coach Chistopher Gaul was hired in March 2020 to kickstart the program.

The program started in 2021 with 10 to 15 students, and they now have a total of 35 students playing on the teams and working behind the scenes.

“We’re still a very young program, obviously three years is quite a short amount of time for a program to be in action and playing games and competing,” Gaul said. “But we’ve won a couple of very big games that we’ve been very proud of, and we [have] had a couple of deep playoff runs so far.”

Esports is a fairly new phenomenon as a whole, and there are many misconceptions regarding the sport’s status as an official athletics program on campus.

“Saying the word esports is more like an umbrella term, like saying the word athletics,” Gaul said.

Point Park’s esports program consists of three teams. There are Rocket League, Valorant, and League of Legends teams, which all are different video games with their own rosters and schedules. 

Most of the esports members are recruited and on scholarship, but there were walk-on tryouts held the second week of school for new students that were unaware of the program. 

The Valorant team kickstarted their season on Wednesday, September 6, where they suffered a 2-0 loss against Kennesaw State. The team will continue to play throughout the fall and spring season.  

The League of Legends team begins their year in October, and their season also lasts the entire school year. The Rocket League team is on a short hiatus for the fall semester, but should continue competing in the spring. 

Additionally Point Park Esports’ student media team truly separates them from other schools’ programs. With a state-of-the-art facility and equipment, students gain valuable hands-on experience.

“About half of our program is focused on students who are media, behind-the-scenes students,” Gaul said. “We call them our broadcast team and our broadcast crew. Similar to the students who are playing on the rosters, they are student athletes, they are on scholarship, they have expectations on them just like everybody else does.”

The broadcast team’s main focus is to create all of the content for the teams. They run the streams, create animations, do commentary, take photos, run social media, produce music, and do every other aspect needed to keep the program going. All of their media is produced in-house by a team of 18 students. 

“It’s a big part of our program, because Point Park is a school that has a lot of communication, media, and graphic design,” Gaul said. “[There are] creative, artistic students and majors, and it’s a very big focus of the school. So I leverage the school’s prowess in that to use as a focus for our program as well.”

Because viewers can’t gather in bleachers to watch games in person, it is difficult for the teams to gain support from the student body. Not to mention, the program is only a few years old.

“One of our big pushing points for this year is doing a better job of touching the community at Point Park and getting our name out there a lot more, because I feel like right now the support isn’t there,” Gaul said. “Not because the students don’t want to, but because the students aren’t aware.”

The primary way to support is to follow their social media pages, subscribe to their YouTube channel, and tune into their streams. Every game is live streamed on Twitch under “PointPark_Esports” and the full games are eventually posted on YouTube under “Point Park Esports.” Their Instagram and X feature match results, game day announcements, MVP posts and general updates. 

Gaul and the returning students paved the way for the program, and it has an extremely bright future. 

“This is about the time you would expect, three years in, where you’re starting to have veterans on our rosters, which is important for the growth of a team and for the growth of newer players,” Gaul said.

Ricky Allen III, a senior animation and digital effects major, has been deeply involved with the esports program since it first began. He worked on the broadcasting crew for three years, and is currently a substitute on the League of Legends team. 

“I feel like [during] my time here with esports, the experience that I got, and the relationships that I’ve made: I’ve done it all,” Allen said. “My time here was well spent, and it feels like I’m kind of just cruising. Especially as a team leader now, letting others do things that I’ve done and teaching them is a fantastic feeling.”

The teams have games throughout the entire school year, so it’s easy to tune in whenever possible. The program may also host an event for students to attend in the near future. 

“Everybody is cool with each other,” Allen said. “It’s one big family.”

The team currently has one win against Temple University and three losses.