Going into the final match of the night against the third placed team in their league, the score tied 1-1, the seventh-seed inaugural LBCC League of Legends e-sports team achieved a clutch victory over their opponent, making the playoffs in their first season.
“I feel nervous, even after we win,” LBCC esports player Fernando Gatica said after achieving victory in the third and final match of Wednesday evening.
But where does the new esports program come from?
The program begins and ends with director of esports Gabe Giangualano, a soccer player turned teacher turned esports coach, who started the program at St. John Bosco a couple years before starting up the LBCC esports program this year.
“Over the period of three years, you start with a kid and then you watch them grow and you actually watch them develop into a very good esports player,” coach Giangualano said, “and so by the time a player is done with me, is moving onto the next stage, I want to have someplace they can go to play at the next tier.”
With this mindset, coach Giangualano reached out to LBCC’s Athletic Director Randy Totorp to share his vision for the program, and the rest is history.
“We basically hit the ground running,” LBCC League of Legends coach Derek Barraza said. “We got approval in July or August and we had to start try-outs the same week.”
To describe League of Legends, it is a 5v5 online battle arena game where each player chooses their own champion out of a list of over 140.
The LBCC e-sports program is divided into four teams, each of which play their own game, including League of Legends, Valorant, Rainbow Six Siege (Siege), and even Rocket League, a game about cars playing soccer.
Each champion fulfills one of five roles, each of which a member of the team is assigned, with roles including “Tanks,” “Support,” “Junglers,” “ADCs” (Attack-Damage Carries) and “APCs” (Ability-Power Carries).
Coach Barraza refuted a number of misconceptions about esports.
“People think that it’s just guys sitting around playing video games and eating Doritos in their basement without seeing the light of day, but that’s not the case,” Barraza said.
He continued, “We’ve got players on the team that are athletes in other sports, they are academics, they’re scholars, they come from all walks of life.”
Coach Giangualano encourages players to train their minds, even filling the room with various board games to give players the chance to flex their critical thinking muscles in creative ways.
Though a sharp mind is very important to esports success, the training of the physical is also essential.
“All four of our teams have different training regiments,” coach Giangualano said. “We have weekend workouts where the entire program gets together and we go do track and weight room together, it helps release endorphins and sharpen our skills.”
With the program being so new, there is no standing lab on campus to accommodate the technological needs of a competitive esports team.
The players instead have to commute to St. John Bosco High School. Plans to break ground on an esports facility at LBCC have been made, but nothing is fully confirmed as of yet.
Being a community college program battling against four-year institutions, there are some unique challenges, such as not having as much player consistency with an average 2 year turnaround on players.
But unlike more traditional sports, an advantage of esports is the ability to play remotely, with a number of the players choosing to play from home instead of traveling to the St. John Bosco esports lab.
Even with this being the inaugural semester of the program combined with a short two-day tryout period, each of the four teams have made it to their own respective playoffs.
With these short turnarounds, players on the LBCC team have to work hard in order to stay competitive with these more established teams.
Four League of Legends players, all of which wore their own red and white sports jerseys, were on the St. John Bosco campus on Wednesday for their match against Harper College Hawks JV.
This included LBCC players Fernando Gatica, Vicente Gonzalez, Jared Lewis, and Samuel Martinez, though more players participated in the game remotely.
Gatica, who has played League of Legends since 2012 and currently fulfills the team’s Support role, spoke on challenges at the beginning of the semester.
“We had a week of tryouts and it was so sudden that we missed the first week of preseason,” Gatica said. “We only had one week to test the waters as a team before the season started.”
With any kind of extracurricular activity, such as being on a sports team or participating in a club, there comes a need for sacrifice when those activities clash with one’s own school work.
Gonzalez, who just started playing League of Legends during the pandemic, spoke on one such instance of that clash of priorities.
“There are some weeks where I’ll have exams and a bunch of quizzes and lab reports I have to do, but also practice,” Gonzalez said. “Sometimes I will divide my time that I should be using for school work to practice instead.”
As the season has gone on, both the communication and comradery of the players have improved according to Lewis, who plays the ADC role on the team.
“We’ve grown a lot since the first days, which especially shows in our teamwork right now,” Lewis said. “Our strategies and just our play-making has shifted from playing for ourselves to more playing for each other as a team.”
Martinez, who plays the Jungler role for LBCC, spoke on how critical effective communication is.
“Communication is essential,” Martinez said. “You cannot win a game without being able to communicate effectively.”
St. John Bosoco’s esports lab also acts as the practice grounds for the high school team, with some LBCC players doubling as their coaches.
Brandon Walker and Elijah Giangualano are both Valorant players for the LBCC team and coaches for the St. John Bosco High School team, and both former soccer players.
When asked about what it takes to be an esports player, both tackled misconceptions surrounding the program.
“It’s just like gaming the way professional soccer is just soccer, it’s on a whole different level,” Walker said. “You can choose to take it seriously.”
“And those people who take it seriously, put in the hours and it shows,” Elijah Giangualano added.
“If you want to go pro and you’re not taking it seriously, there’s no chance,” Walker finished.
Paul Giangualano, a coach for the high school League of Legends team focuses on breaking bad habits, developed when players first learned the game.
“It takes a lot of time, and patience,” Paul Giangualano said. “A lot of my players are just starting, so having the patience to teach them the right way to do things rather than the way they’re so used to is vital.”
League of Legends has a degree of infamy regarding the toxicity of its fanbase and players. In order to deal with this toxicity, players that begin to exhibit rudeness towards others are usually benched.
“I absolutely despise it,” Paul Giangualano said. “If you’re toxic on a Monday before a game, I will sit you.”
The league also takes toxicity seriously, with rules being in place to allow the reporting of negative comments, which can lead to the complete forfeit of a game and a hit to the team’s reputation.
“Any sort of “BMing” (bad mannering) could result in the other team reporting you and now you have to forfeit the match, which is just disrespectful and goes into the terms of service of the leagues.”
The program’s next big event will be the Grim Cup, a live event occurring Nov. 19 – 20 to be held on stage in the auditorium at St. John Bosco.
Coach Gabe Giangualano hopes for the event to allow the players to feel energized by the crowd experience, much like that of a traditional sports game, which he feels they currently lack.
The program also live streams their games on twitch at https://www.twitch.tv/lbcc_esports
When asked whether the esports program is a club or a sport, both coaches gave the same response.
“It is a sport, and it’s not easy.”