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Feb 5, 2022
Photo by Robert A. DeFrank – For Eric Schnegg, senior at St. John’s Central Academy in Bellaire, and other students, a passion for video games has led to launching an esports program. Gamers compete against Ohio-based players in online matches. Schnegg has earned a scholarship at Marietta College.
BELLAIRE — Electronic sports, or “esports,” has become prominent and recognized in some schools along with football and volleyball teams. St. John’s Central Academy has followed the trend and launched its own esports program for gamers.
Eric Schnegg of Clarington, a senior, started the program along with fellow student Cora Metz of Rayland.
“Originally me and my friend Cora, we both went up to an esports camp up at Akron, and we sort of saw their whole program going on, and we thought ‘this is really nice,’ so we tried to work with the school to try and get something like that here, and I’d say after maybe a year or so we actually got it all started up,” he said.
“I’d say our team has somewhere in between 12 and 15 (members),” he said. Seasons are about six weeks long and the team got two wins against other schools.
“We have been still participating and working on getting better, just so that we have a foundation and people can self-improve,” he said. “There’s no particular goal, just to have fun.”
They have played other Ohio-based teams based in sites such as Akron and Cleveland. The gamers compete online without having to meet their opponents at a physical location.
“It can take some time to get into the groove of the game and actually understand how all of it works,” Eric Schnegg said. “For now it’s pretty much all competitive head-on-head.”
“There’s 50 teams that make up the OVAC,” St. John’s Principal Vince Gianangeli said, adding they have not competed against any local esports teams.
“It’s one of the very few schools in the actual overall OVAC that even offers something like that,” Gianangeli said. “They have scholarships now for kids. He’s one of the ones who got a scholarship to Marietta (College) for esports.”
Eric Schnegg said the sport is still relatively small.
“Really all you had to do to go up there was to sort of try out, and if they like you enough, they’ll give you a scholarship,” he said. “About $2,000 a year. … It’s not really official yet. Once people get to know about it and talk about it and maybe get organized stuff, I think it’ll go up soon.”
The list of games is currently limited, but they hope to expand the variety.
“Our school currently only offers Overwatch for now, however we think we might eventually start to go with more games. Rocket League might be next. It’s sort of a process to know which people want to play what games. We’ve got to make sure we have enough.”
The six gaming systems are on the top floor of the school, along with the computers used for state testing.
“They’re going to pay him $8,000 to play video games in college,” Eric Schnegg’s mother, Assistant Principal Brandee Schnegg, said. “You can’t beat that.”
Schnegg will be taking on the principal’s role when Gianangeli steps down to take the role of marketing director for the school. She noted the students built all six systems, with six more to be built.
“We had to order them in sections because when we were just getting started, our booster club was tremendous and bought all our parts at the beginning of our program,” she said. “That’s what the kids originally built with, and we were able to purchase six more computers recently that the kids built.”
She added another student was knowledgeable about what parts would be needed for the desired gaming systems.
“We can game full-time here,” she said.
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