OTSU Esports:
More than just gaming, a place for growth
(This article originally appeared on the Ontario Tech Student Speak blog)
Hi, I’m Sinthu, the Project Coordinator at the Ontario Tech Student Union (OTSU). I graduated in 2022 with a degree in marketing and I’ve been a part of the esports community at Ontario Tech for basically my entire time here.
Belonging to this group was how I made my closest friends at university, explored my passion for gaming, and led me on a career path to my dream industry. I can’t express just how fulfilling it’s been to help build this program from a club of casual gamers into a fully-fledged program of the OTSU complete with its own arena and collegiate roster. It's been one of the absolute best experiences of my post-secondary career, plus it gave me a great job after I graduated!
A Place to Discover
When the pandemic hit, everyone needed to a place to connect virtually – a place where you could meet to study or hang out, or to socialize and have fun. The OTSU Esports Discord server ended up being the perfect place where you could get together, play some games and relax, or even get help with your course work.
It became a virtual hub for students and opened the doors for esports to enter the mainstream. And now that Province of Ontario is investing $1 million in post-secondary esports scholarships – and Ontario Tech students can apply for $25,000 worth of them – it’s only getting more and more popular.
Since then, and with the help of the OTSU, our Discord community more than doubled and we’ve been able to expand to give students opportunities to develop personal and professional skills, establish an elite roster of collegiate-level esports players, and provide an inclusive space for all Ontario Tech students to meet like-minded people and have a deeper involvement with their university experience.
A Place to Connect
While we do have die hard gamers who are on another level, OTSU Esports is first and foremost a community. We organize weekly game nights that anyone of any skill level can join and have fun, host viewing parties, and hold monthly tournaments with awesome prizes.
We change up the games all the time based on players’ preference and what’s popular, but some of the games we play are:
- Jackbox
- OSU!
- Valorant
- Super Smash Bros.
- Apex Legends
- Beat Saber
- Among Us
Additionally, we recently opened our start-or-the-art esports arena with 12 brand new machines that are FREE for Ontario Tech students to drop in and use between 10am and 4pm. I actually built them all myself and they all have these specs:
- CPU: Ryzen 5 5600x
- GPU: EVGA GeForce RTX 3070
- Ram: 32 GB @ 3200Mhz
A Place to Get Good
It’s not all fun and games though (but mostly it is!). We have some pretty elite players at our school, actually, and we’ve created an environment for highly skilled players to test their abilities against some of the best colleges and universities across North America.
We have over 70 players on our roster who play in several leagues, including NACE, NECC, CLOL, and CVAL, among others, competing in:
- League of Legends
- Valorant
- Overwatch 2
- Rainbow Six Siege
- Rocket League
- Hearthstone
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
- Fortnite
- Beat Saber
- Eternal Return
- Call of Duty
Some of the notable wins we’ve taken home recently are:
- NECC: 1st place trophy for Valorant, challengers division (2022)
- Canadian Esports Nationals: 2nd place in Overwatch (2022)
- 2nd place: Tespa Hearthstone Collegiate Championships (2021)
- 2nd place: NACE Fortnite Spring Cup Duos (2021)
We’re always on the hunt for top talent, so if you're interested in trying out, tryouts are in August/September every year and you can get a hold of us on Discord.
A Place to Learn
One of the most important aspects of our program is the opportunity for students to learn new skills that will help them in their future careers. There are a bunch of executive positions available to Ontario Tech students to get involved with.
Whether you’re in software engineering, law, marketing, game development, or commerce, want a career in sales, graphic design, programming, or journalism, gaming is a cosmopolitan industry with a variety of career paths – there’s a place for everyone! The positions we currently have are:
- Team Executives
- Coaches
- Community Executives
- Communication Executives (social media, graphic design)
- Production team (broadcaster, commentator, observer)
Through these positions, we aim to give students exposure to practicing in-demand job skills like, using OBS software, media relations, customer service, programming, event management, and more.
A Place to Grow
Though we’ve come a very long way in a short time, we still have a lot we want to accomplish in the coming years. We of course want to crush the competition in league play and take home Ws, but we’re looking to enhance the professional look and feel of our broadcasts and our arena to make us more notable on the pro stage, we have plans to grow our sponsorship base, and we want to continue to develop our community and provide more events and activities.
We’re just getting started, so…maybe you can help us? Looking forward to meeting you!
