Let’s Practice Bobcats!
Practice, Scrimmages, Tournaments, and Interscholastic Competitions. These are some examples of things that school athletics, or school interscholastic competitors do during the school year in order to improve their ability and maintain their skill set and team cohesion.
An important thing to understand about E-Sports is that we practice our games.. alot. For obvious reasons practicing E-Sports games is really easy, typically we all play the game we compete in during our free time. Even in the cases we don’t, we are playing other games with skills or other aspects that will transfer over to the game. This is one of the perks of E-Sports competition, not only can just about anyone try their hand at competing, but you can practice anytime so long as you have an internet connection and computer.
When it comes to team competitions and E-Sports organizations such as the Texas State E-Sports organization, we gather each others best availability and establish a schedule for all of us to get together and practice in. An example of such seen below.
Listed above is an example of the website ‘When2Meet‘ and the practice availability of the members of the TXST Overwatch Varsity roster. As you can see, where as most sports would be forced to end due to dinner time, weather, or the onset of night time, E-Sports competitors can go on late into the night to practice, and can start practicing as soon as right after school if necessary.
Overall, practices and scrimmages are a key part to competitive play in E-Sports, not only do we practice a lot, but we can also compete a lot more. Due to our increases availability and ease of access to our competitions, there is also a higher likelihood at novice and amateur play of increased matches per session. For the TXST Overwatch team, previously we would compete in 2 best of 3 matches every Sunday, coupled with 3 practices and a scrimmage per week. The League of Legends team, for example, would practice for 4 hours twice a week and scrimmage for 2-4 hours per week, while also participating in as many as 2 matches of best of 3, which can last up to 2 1/2 hours each.
E-Sports and practice go hand in hand, and while we may not physically be practicing and working out twice a week or everyday… It doesn’t mean we aren’t practicing and working hard everyday to improve our abilities to win. A stigma which needs to be shed by the E-Sports community is that E-Sports is lazy and requires little time and ability. However, we put in hours of practice a day, and run the risk of taking the fun out of our hobbies for the chance to compete at high levels of play.
TXST E-Sports 