Column: Breakfast of Champions – A day with Julius Peel

by Tyler Comeau

A group of seven college students convened late Saturday morning at the Hometown Diner in Rindge. They all shuffled into their seats at a table for six with an extra chair placed in one corner. Shoulder to shoulder, they joked and looked at their menus while discussing the day ahead. Today was an important day for the Esports team at Franklin Pierce: they would be facing off against Bates College from Lewiston, Maine, their first competitive game of the season.

Gavin Clark, a senior from Pierce, was at the table with Brian Dowling and Dylan Leblanc, both juniors. They talked strategy while also talking about what kind of omelet or French toast they wanted. Each of them had their designated roles on the team and already were speculating what characters they should play as. Julius Peel was at the head of the table. Peel was a senior and the team coordinator of the League of Legends team.

League of Legends is a video game of the multiplayer online battle arena, or MOBA, genre. In the game, players pick from dozens of different characters, known as champions, each with a unique play style and set of moves. Teams of five players face off against each other, destroying each other’s minions and bases, as well as enemy players, until one team wins. The game has amassed a large fanbase and is one of the most competitive video games in the world with international tournaments every year. Some schools have even begun to offer athletic scholarships for students that play League of Legends, something that Peel wishes Franklin Pierce offered but does not foresee in the near future. The League of Legends college scene has over 200 universities playing at the same time.

Peel, along with being a player and team coordinator, is president of Franklin Pierce Esports. He founded the Esports team with four other friends his sophomore year. Initially, they had trouble getting it off the ground, as Student Involvement did not recognize Esports as a club sport.

“It was tough, because at first we go to student involvement and they say, you know, ‘This kinda sounds like you’re trying to make a club sport,’” said Peel, “but then they’re also like, ‘well, its also not a sport.’ And I said, ‘To me, I think it is.’”

Instead, they worked with Doug Carty, who at one point headed a video game competitive team in the early 2000s. “He said, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’ve already done it before, let’s do it again.’” Peel states that they had roughly 20 students show up to the first two meetings. Since then, the Esports team have established themselves as a sport on campus and continue to compete and represent their school.

After their meal, Peel met with Gavin, Dylan, and Brian in his dorm at Lakeview. A fifth player, Taki, played with them online from his home in Keene. They had a microphone placed in the middle of the room on top of an old Chegg box and used it to talk with Taki and gives commands in real time. Their plan was to get a couple of practice games in before facing Bates College.

Before playing, the team researched the players they’d be facing. “I don’t want to break your guys’ hearts…” said Peel.

“Lemme guess,” said Brian, “they’re Diamond II?”

“Yup,” Said Peel. According to League of Graphs.com, Diamond II is the fifth highest rank a team can get in the entire game, making up only 0.17 percent of the overall player base. “Those are exceptional numbers,” said Peel, looking over the players’ statistics. “They’re good players.”

The team started their practice rounds against random players online. They looked at a spreadsheet with their history and stats with each character, using it to decide which to play and which they needed to improve on. Once they started playing, the team was focused. The room filled with the sound of mouse clicks and keyboard presses with the teammates occasionally shouting commands and alerting each other from across the room. The players had hotkeys and buttons memorized, able to move their characters and look about the map in mere seconds. Even when they died, the team never seemed to get angry or frustrated. They stayed calm and focused, finding alternative plans and trying to coordinate the best strategy. They won their first practice after a game that lasted roughly 25 minutes. “Just in time for another round!” said Peel.

The League team went for another round of practice before their big game against Bates College. This time, however, things did not go as well as they would have liked.

“Oh my god I can’t hit ‘em!” Peel cried out at one point. The team lost their second game and spirits were somewhat lower. The enemy team players added the FPU team as friends after the match. Disappointed, Julius grabbed a piece of vanilla cake.

“That was a tough one” said Dylan. The game ended just fifteen minutes before the anticipated game. When asked how he was feeling at that moment, Peel replied, “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous, but it’s the first game so I always get a lot of nerves.”

Moments before 3 p.m., Peel received a message from a member of the Bates College team. “Our team is unfortunately forfeiting this week’s match,” it read, “not everyone is available to play.”

The team wasn’t quick to accept the win, however. They’ve been bitten in the past by teams claiming to not be available, in one instance a team threatened to report them for being late to a game after forfeiting. The Franklin Pierce team ended up playing against them and won two to nothing.

After waiting until 3:15, the team started to accept their win. They joked about the whole thing, Gavin Clark saying, “The beginning of the season and we get a bye week and a forfeit. Two weeks off in a row everybody!”

Peel expressed some concern over the future of Franklin Pierce Esports, but on the whole has been happy with the school’s support of the group. “One of the big difficulties is, as I’ve learned this year, popularity of games determines a lot and popularity of games changes a lot. So League, sophomore year pretty popular, last year it started to drop down quite a bit. Player base numbers on a global scale have been dropping.”

Esports has branched out to more than just League of Legends. Now, he oversees two teams on campus, one that plays League and another that plays Super Smash Bros. Peel hopes to have the Esports teams on campus play other games, but expresses concerns over equipment and funding. In order to play games, students are using their own computers and game consoles. This posts problems when wanting to practice since student’s systems are not always compatible. The Esports team will be facing against Roger Williams University in the coming week, which Peel says was one of the first schools in the country to offer athletic scholarships for Esports. A team that was once not recognized as a sports team is going strong and continuing to go against sports teams from across New England.