Little Falls Having Early Success With ESports Team

LITTLE FALLS (WJON News) -- The Little Falls High School ESports team is already having success in its first year. The Flyers are sending two, two-player teams to the Fall Esports State Tournament on Sunday. Freshmen Ben Tchida and Luke Knopik make up one team, and Junior Peter Knopik and Freshman Jariel Toribio make up the second.

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They both will be competing in the popular game Fortnite. Head Coach Nathan Selby says the league takes the online game and makes unique challenges for the kids to compete in:

"It is the online game but the league has created a custom map that we use and its 2v2, and there is three different game modes that we go through, five games for each game mode and the winner is basically each game ends up being a point and its who ever gets to 8 points first."

Nathan Selby, Little Falls High School

Selby says besides having skill in the game communication is a big part of being successful for Esports, he says ESports is an important opportunity for the kids to have:

"We're reaching a lot of kids that aren't involved in anything else. On my team I had mentioned that I've got some kids that are in some traditional sports but when it comes down to it of those 27, less than a third are involved in sports and less than half are involved in any sort of club or anything outside of school. This is the only thing that they do."

Selby says a lot of the games are the same from year to year but they do change based on popularity, and the coaches get input into what games will be played each season. The state tournament is being held at Windom Studios at the Mall of America from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

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