Esports club finds home in old post office building
Between Maverik Stadium and Aggie Village is an old building labeled “Central Post and Distribution.” Inside is not a postal service, but the hub of Utah State University’s Esports Club.
While the building does not have the official name on the outside, members of the club call it the Esports Center.
“The idea behind it was Esports Center would be ESC, like the escape key on the keyboard,” said Tanner Timothy.
Timothy, a junior studying human experience design and interaction, is a member of the club’s executive council.
“People just come here, have a good time, meet new friends and people who are interested in the same games as them and play together,” Timothy said.
The club hosts a variety of events, including watching movies with pizza and snacks, playing horror video games around Halloween and Super Smash Bros. tournaments.
Since the club operates under Campus Recreation, students can use their A-number to get in and check out items like a headset, a keyboard and a mouse.
“Come when you can, and just come to play games,” said Hunter Lovell, a member of the club and a junior studying information systems.
There are two sides of the club: one for casual gamers and the other for competitive gamers.
Despite not being considered an athletic sport by the school, the esports club still competes at the collegiate level.
Esports are a new field of competition, so there is not a single centralized league that governs the players. Each game maker hosts its own esports competitions. For example, Halo will hold competitions for Halo players. The National Esports Collegiate Conference hosts competitions.
The club fields a variety of competitions and players, including a varsity and junior varsity team.
“We have a League of Legends varsity and junior varsity team, a Valorant varsity and junior varsity team,” Timothy said. “We have four Halo teams, including an all-female roster. We have three Overwatch teams, two Rocket League teams.”
According to Timothy, team tryouts are held the first two weeks of each semester.
Lovell said collegiate esports is “a growing community,” and the teams play against other colleges across the nation.
Collegiate level competitions feature games like Apex Legends, Halo, Rainbow Six Siege, Rocket League, Valorant, Overwatch 2 and League of Legends. During the 2023 fall semester, the USU team placed top five in the country for Halo Infinite within the NECC.
The club also broadcasts their own competitive matches. There are two broadcasters who comment on the games the same way an NCAA radio commentator would on a basketball game.
Lovell said compared to traditional sports like basketball, where aspiring-pro players spend years moving up from rec leagues and high school to university and national levels, the entry into esports is a smoother pipeline.
“You just start playing a game. And if you find, you know, you have kind of a knack for it, you just keep furthering yourself, and then eventually you’ll find yourself on a pro-team,” Lovell said.
Before the club moved to the postal building, they were located in the Fieldhouse beneath the deadlift rack.
“Every once in a while, the whole room would just shake, and we would always make a joke like, ‘Oh, that guy just PR’d up there,’” Timothy said.
And before the Fieldhouse, the club met in a tiny room within the Emma Eccles Jones Education Building, which Timothy described as smaller than a dorm room.
“We had two tables along the walls,” he said. “We just lined up like six PCs on each side. If you backed up, you’d hit the person behind you.”
Cramped, noisy, and difficult to keep clean, the room had “wires everywhere.”
“It is so much better here,” Timothy said about the ESC. “It is just 100 million times better.”
Like other small groups on campus, the club struggles with funding.
“There is an infinite amount of equipment we can buy, and we have a very not infinite amount of money,” said Jack Thompson, the coach of the competitive teams.
The club’s executive council partnered with Campus Rec and the instructional technology and learning sciences department, who provided the computers the club currently uses.
“They are part of a classroom,” Thompson said. “People come to class on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
Timothy, who is one of the teachers for the class, said the ITLS grant included around 30 brand-new computers.
“All with new monitors and everything and all that equipment,” Timothy said.
The club also has difficulty informing people of their existence. Lovell said because they are located inside the old postal building, students often have difficulty finding them.
“I think there’s a very healthy percentage of like the student body that plays video games and cares about video games, but they just don’t know that this is a thing,” Lovell said.