Jacob Utities, a teacher that used to work at Park said there’s no difference between being a teacher and eSports adviser because he is still  mentoring students.

“It gives me more time to help kids do what they love, and that is video games. [As well as] getting them to the next level by doing competitions,” Utities said. 

“I feel like I can certainly dedicate even more time to coaching now with my schedule since my entire job is based on eSports. It’s a bummer sometimes, but I think I made the right decision for now,” Utities said. 

According to Utities, eSports performed decent last year during competition.

“Last semester we did really well. We had two team competing in the national tournament, which is huge considering there is around 3 to 4 thousand schools competing in this tournament. Our overwatch team got 3rd place and could’ve won it all,” Utities said.

Utities has been involved in the program at the park since eSports started. He was not a coach  at the time and just volunteered, but now is the program coach.

“I started at the school in 2017 this will be my third  year doing eSports in the school,” Utities said.

According to Utities, he has been involved in eSports for many years as a player, but transitioned into being a coach once the high school eSports league began.

“Utities is fine and  it takes a lot to know everything about the ten different games,” Jonathan Draheim said. “The club is fun and all and the people are nice and it’s a great community. As a club we did pretty well; we had three or four different teams in to the national tournament and we had one team that won third place and most made playoffs.”

 According to Westrup, he really wanted to join last year but didn’t have time for it. 

“I was looking forward to computer classes with [Utities] for the next couple years at school and I think he’s been a good advisor and a good role model and coach thus far. This year I joined and I’m glad he’s my coach [because] he’s doing a very good job,” Westrup said.