The Keene State College Esports team has had a successful second season under the leadership of Noah Drouin and Mike Godzik.
The Academy Rocket League team and Overwatch team both finished with six wins, going undefeated all season. This was a big step up from the previous season.
Junior Korben Robinson, captain of the Overwatch 2 team, commented, “Last season, we barely made the playoffs in our division. This season, we are the only undefeated team in our whole conference. We’ve come a long way over the past few months, and are still improving so much more over time.”
Robinson said esports is different from other programs at KSC, and because of that they have to go about doing many things differently.
“This is where I think we differ from a lot of other programs, and it definitely contributes to our success. They may have a single very strong player, or have extremely good fundamentals, but true teamwork is irreplaceable, as cheesy as that sounds,” said Robinson.
Participation of the esports program has gone up in the past year. The team’s success has drawn in students that were already at Keene State.
“We’ve had a large increase in participation in our program in our first season, which was last spring 2024. I wasn’t able to recruit anybody out of high school or anything obviously because that was a mid-year addition to athletics. And so I could only create teams basically through walk-on, existing Keene State students,” said Drouin.
Drouin said there is not just growth through numbers but winning as well. Two of the teams went undefeated and others saw more success than in the prior season.
“The win-loss ratio wasn’t super important to me. One of my large responsibilities coming into this position was to recruit 10 new students out of high school into sports, which I successfully did. After expanding, we’re now up to 27 total students participating in team stage sports, and we also added a new game that we’re competing in,” said Drouin.
Drouin said coaches have tools for recruitment and expanding the future of the program.
“There’s the opportunity for me to kind of legitimize the way that I am able to recruit and bring people on. The interest is there from spectators, from those who want to participate. So it’s very exciting and I definitely see us continuing to expand into the future,” said Drouin.
The esports team has earned a spot to compete in the playoffs to continue their second season.
Madelyn French can be contacted at
mafrench@kscequinox.com
