Bethel Es­ports: One Step For­ward, Two Steps Back

Es­ports, oth­er­wise known as elec­tronic sports, are com­pe­ti­tions re­volv­ing around video games. This field of com­pe­ti­tion be­gan with Atar­i’s 1980 “Space In­vader Cham­pi­onship” and is grow­ing quickly for its rel­a­tively young age, so much so that Bethel has taken an in­ter­est in form­ing their own com­pet­i­tive es­ports team. As with any new en­deavor, this has­n’t been with­out chal­lenges. 

The growth of es­ports is most ac­cu­rately put on dis­play through num­bers; Atar­i’s orig­i­nal com­pe­ti­tion brought in an es­ti­mated 10,000 com­peti­tors. One year later, in 1981, Atari held its sec­ond es­ports com­pe­ti­tion and, with pro­mo­tions, they once again ex­pected up­wards of 10,000 com­peti­tors to par­tic­i­pate but only brought in 138 in­stead. How­ever, these hum­ble and tu­mul­tuous be­gin­nings led to one of the fastest-grow­ing phe­nom­ena of the mod­ern-day. By 2018, the League of Leg­ends Mid-Sea­son In­vi­ta­tion viewer count reached around 67 mil­lion in­di­vid­ual spec­ta­tors; with a 6700 times in­crease in view­er­ship, the quickly grow­ing la­bel is far from un­sta­ble. 

Bethel’s for­ma­tion of an Es­ports team, on the other hand, may still be. Apart from the in­for­ma­tion in the orig­i­nal an­nounce­ment – this be­ing that we’ll be based in the ren­o­vated Cen­tury Cen­ter, start­ing with teams in League of Leg­ends, Rocket League and Over­watch – lit­tle else is known. As of the call-out meet­ing on Feb. 25, the team lacks a coach and, as such, lacks any real struc­ture. Though proper try-outs were planned for early April, the ex­act time­line is cur­rently un­cer­tain.  

Bethel may be “dip­ping its toes” in the prover­bial wa­ters of this en­deavor, but with no coach and no pub­licly an­nounced plans for mov­ing for­ward, the team has moved one step for­ward and two steps back.