Baldwin Wallace University Esports Director Jake Grasso and his team have taken several wins since receiving an esports lounge in Loomis. Since starting in 2021, BW esports got a lounge equipped with high-performance computers and Nintendo Switches, and the team has also grown to be 55 members strong.
Currently, the team competes in three leagues with five titles: Valorant, Rocket League, Call of Duty, Overwatch and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
Last fall, the SSBU team won the Erie Division, and this past spring they came in second place.
“Competition is something everyone has inherently, and it’s just a matter of finding where that drive for competition is, and for a lot of people, it’s esports,” SSBU Team Captain Brian “Bee” Flowers said.
Flowers also said how he hopes to get the team members out there, so BW will become known for esports.
The COD team beat Ohio State University last year in a major upset. Director Jake Grasso believes the team could’ve even gotten a bit further.
“We weren’t playing on the best PC’s, and we didn’t have the best internet at the facility we were running at,” Grasso said.
The COD team is currently in the Collegiate Call of Duty League, which includes schools across the entire nation. The team won so many games that they got moved from Division Two to Division One. Last fall, they also won their conference championship.
Last year, the Valorant team also won several games but missed the playoffs by 0.2 points. This seated them at ninth, with only the top eight teams progressing to the playoffs; however, in their first year, the team came in eighth.
Grasso became BW’s esports director in 2022. The program began with only Grasso, his laptop, and an office in the board room of the rec.
“The culture has to be great,” Grasso said, making that sentiment his goal for the first year and a half of the program.
The team practices by having a strategy session, watching recordings of their past competitions or just playing a game together. 90-95% of the BW esports team had never played competitively before, Grasso said.
At the start of the program, Grasso said he could have never imagined having the facility they have now. He’s shocked at the growth of the team over the short period of time it’s been established, and he said he will have to reevaluate the team’s five-year plan thanks to the growth of the program.
“We are winning games people don’t expect us to win… we’re hitting marks I didn’t expect to hit until year three or four,” Grasso said.
The director doesn’t necessarily want to make esports more mainstream, but he does want to put BW out there in the world of esports.
