Glynn Academy made an exciting foray into the GHSA playoffs over spring break last week.
But the Terrors’ tennis teams begin their playoff push at home Wednesday, and baseball’s postseason isn’t set to begin until this weekend. It wasn’t the Glynn track and field teams, nor its golf programs.
No, this past Friday, it was Glynn Academy’s Esports teams that made an appearance in the Sweet 16 round in their inaugural year in the Georgia High School Association sanctioned sport.
In a room set up inside the school’s former cafeteria, Glynn had students competing for an Elite 8 bid in Madden — an officially licensed NFL video game series — and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, a crossover fighting game published by Nintendo.
The GHSA started offering Esports in October 2018, beginning with League of Legends as the lone game and has since expanded to eight games including: Rocket League, Splatoon, NBA 2K and Mario Kart. Glynn Academy has long had a game club where more than two dozen students regularly come together to play against one another, but it wasn’t until the 2022-23 school year that the Terrors were able to establish the sport.
As it turns out, Super Smash Bros. was the catalyst behind graduating the club into a full-blown athletics program. Competing in a tournament held by College of Coastal Georgia, members of the Glynn Academy game club placed second, third, fourth and fifth overall.
“That kind of started generating the interest,” said Jesse Knowles, a teacher at Glynn Academy and coach of the Esports team, as well as a local club volleyball squad.
It wouldn’t be long before Glynn launched its Esports program this past August, jumping immediately into the competition in the only GHSA sport held in both the fall and spring semesters.
In the fall, Glynn Academy qualified for the playoffs in both Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate before expanding the team even further in spring to include Madden and Rocket League.
Each game must be played according to rules of the PlayVS High School Esports League, which dictate details such as roster requirements, game format, stage selection, etc.
In Madden, players are required to play best-of-three in games with five-minute quarters, clear weather, and “even teams” selected. Terrors senior Vincent Higgins took up the challenge of representing his school in the football simulator.
While Higgins has been playing the franchise since Madden ’15, this was his first semester playing for Glynn Academy. He was clad in a black Najee Harris Pittsburgh Steelers jersey, gripping onto a Playstation 4 controller in front of a large screen in the old cafeteria as he awaited his Sweet 16 opponent to log into the game.
“Huge football fan,” Higgins responded when asked the obvious.
Higgins’ father’s side of the family is from Erie, Pa., and the Steelers are his favorite team, but there is no room for favoritism in competition. Higgins has spent much of the season playing with the Los Angeles Chargers.
“We play on even teams, which is a setting so that if you have a lower overall player, he’ll be raised to match that player,” Higgins said. “And there is something in the game called ‘superstar abilities.’ The Chargers have the most players on their team with those, and I looked at those, and they have them in good positions — like they have two edge rushers, so if you have a quarterback trying to break the pocket, no matter where he goes, he’s going to have an edge rusher that’s going to get off that edge really fast.
“They have a quarterback, two wide receivers, a running back, just all the good positions you want to have those abilities at.”
After coming back from a loss in Game 1 of the best-of-three series in the first round to win the next two, Higgins found himself matched up with the defending Madden state champion out of Peach County in the Sweet 16.
He’s played a variety of teams throughout the year, and the Kansas City Chiefs more than any other squad, but Higgins was a bit surprised to see his opponent pick the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the opening contest.
Higgins received the opening kickoff looking to take it directly to the reigning champion, but he made a costly mistake with an interception that set him into an early 7-0 deficit. However, he’d recover on the next possession to find a rhythm and drive down field to tie the score run/pass option in the red zone.
“I like to dink and dunk down the field,” Higgins said. “If you can get a dude frustrated by getting in a groove, you can get him to call a coverage he doesn’t normally call, and you just call plays that attack different parts of the field.
“You come out in gun tight and you’re attacking the outsides, and you see he’s putting zones there, maybe now you can attack the inside.”
Higgins would go down 15-7 at halftime, but he was still within one score with just two minutes remaining in the game when his opponent scored a touchdown on 3rd and long to pull away for a 31-15 victory.
The senior switched his strategy a bit headed into Game 2, choosing the Green Bay Packers for the team’s inside run-stopping abilities, and this time he was the one to score the first touchdown, eventually carrying a 12-8 advantage into halftime.
Unfortunately, Higgins would be held scoreless in the second half en route to a 24-12 defeat, but he had no reason to hang his head after hanging with the favorite to win back-to-back state titles.
Reminding the players of such is one of the primary roles of an Esports coach.
“It’s pretty much support,” Knowles said. “You start talking about stuff like, ‘Hey, what about this?’ It is about focus. It’s about saying, ‘You know your strengths. You’ve seen just happened. What can you take and work with?’ It’s about the mindset.”
Jeff Grange, another Esports coach at Glynn Academy with his own background in competitive gaming, has also picked up a few tricks to try to help his program gain any edge it can.
“Even if I don’t know the game quite as well, there are strategies that you learn through coaching,” Grange said. “Like play order was something we just negotiated a few minutes ago, and we learned you have to lock rosters at 3:45. So we switched our roster at 3:44, so they didn’t have time to respond. Just little things like that, encouraging the players, making sure we can try to get the best players, get the message out.”
In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, teams are made up of three players, but each player competes one-on-one against a player from the opposing team in a best-of-three series with the winner being awarded a point. The match is decided when one team earns two points.
Each player picks from a roster of characters throughout various video games, and in the opening matchup Glynn Academy’s Ahren Murray chose Tekken character Kazuya Mishima to fight Persona 5 protagonist Joker.
Each battle went down to the wire, but Murray lost both matches three deaths to two. Triston Smith was next up for Glynn, using Metroid protagonist Samus Aran to play his opponent’s Kazuya Mishima, and after a couple of 3-1 defeats, the Terrors’ Esports season was officially over.
Even though the match was decided, Matthew Steubing played out the string, recording a pair of comfortable 3-1 victories using Cloud from Final Fantasy VII against Fox of Star Fox.
Although the season ended prematurely for the Terrors, is little doubt that Glynn Academy will have another group of gamers ready to challenge even deeper into the Esports postseason in coming years.
“It’s one of these sports where anybody can be in it, and it doesn’t matter who you are,” Knowles said. “You can be the football player, but then you come in and you’re sitting next to a person that’s maybe not as athletic, but they’re all playing together and having a good time.
“I think Esports is like the great equalizer.”