By Rebekah Gonzalez
February 18, 2022
Hoover High School got a major upgrade for its thriving esports clubs. According to KPBS, the club now has a new space on campus dedicated to competitive gaming and it’s stocked with high-end computers, gaming chairs, headphones, and more resources.
“I’d say the most popular game that’s going on right now, at least in esports, is still Rocket League, Super Smash Bros and Valorant,” the esports club captain and Hoover High School senior Henry Hoang told KPBS.
The new state-of-the-art setup is a huge improvement from before, according to Hoang. "I remember I first joined the esports club here at Hoover in my sophomore year. We kind of had a little underground, dungeon area. We’d usually play on the school computers. We never had the luxury of trying to build one."
Hoover High’s Esports Club is coached by Jack Wetzel who also runs the robotics club and teaches both math and computer science at the school. He’s been head of the program since 2016.
“I think esports is just any digital sport, ranging from chess, to these competitive first-person shooters,” Wetzel told KPBS. “But if I was gonna say what it is here at Hoover, it’s a community. It’s about students having a safe place where they have like-minded people to collaborate and be friends with.”
Hoover High is just one part of the developing esports scene in San Diego. San Diego State University is about to launch a new certificate program called Business of Esports, which will be open to people of all ages.
“It doesn’t matter if you are black or white, or a kid or an old man, old woman, high IQ, low IQ, physically disabled or physically strong: they all can compete in the same game,” said one of the program’s professors Newton Lee said. “To me that is truly amazing. You cannot see that in any physical sport.”
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