Murphy – One of the sports teams at Murphy High School that gets commonly overlooked is the esports team.
The esports team – a sanctioned sport in North Carolina and many other states – is a club that plays competitive videos games with other schools throughout the East Region.
The East encompasses the majority of the Eastern Time Zone, meaning the Bulldogs can play teams ranging from Florida to New York and anywhere in between.
Their main game is Valorant – a team-based, first-person shooter game. They also compete in Madden football, with one person playing.
Valorant is a five vs. five shooter game, where one team plants a spike and the other team has to capture it. A game can also be ended by killing the entire other team.
In competitive Valorant, the first time to 13 wins earns the win in the match. The Murphy esports team has their Valorant matches every around 4 p.m. Wednesdays.
The esports team’s head coach, Alyssa Montague, spoke about the season, the benefits of esports and her love of competitive gaming.
Murphy had a few students who wanted to start a team, and Montague stepped in to lead to the team. She played competitive esports in high school and was on an all-girls Counter-Strike team.
“I thought it would be cool to have something that was actually a school-sponsored athletic team to give opportunities to kids who maybe aren’t into tradition sports or can’t play traditional sports, for whatever reason,” she said.
“But still have that competitive edge and want to get involved in something.”
Some of the benefits of esports are similar to those of traditional sports, she Montague. She mentioned communication and conflict resolution as key benefits of esports.
Because the Murphy esports team is school sponsored, they have a code of conduct to follow, resulting in a positive gaming environment. She added that through esports, students benefit from the social aspect on competitive gaming, teamwork and problem solving.
One of Montague’s main goals with the team is to grow the program. Through the platform they use, there are more than 10 games they can choose from. She would like to expand the team into other games as well as sticking with Valorant and Madden. They also wanted to be highly ranked.
Out of the possible games they can play, Montague said she would like Murphy to have a Splatoon team because the game in general in positive and creates a fun environment playing it. She added that she would like to have a 10-minute chess esports team, a sanctioned esport through chess.com.
After the competition of the regular season, they will head to the playoffs. The playoffs are structured by region, and the Murphy team competes in the East.
Playoffs are based on rankings. Murphy is ranked No. 17 after its most recent win on March 4.
On March 4, the Bulldogs’ Valorant team won 13-5 against a similarly ranked opponent from a high school in New York to improve to 3-1 overall this season.
The Murphy Valorant team is made up of senior captain Caleb Prohl, senior Nathan Johnson, junior Carter Hooper, sophomore Cyrus Sullivan and sophomore Arturo Hernandez-Perez.