eSports teams from across the state battle at MacArthur

LAWTON, Okla. (KSWO) - eSports players from 11 different Southwest Oklahoma schools met at MacArthur High School Tuesday for this year’s Super Smash Brothers Qualifier.

Roughly 60 high school and middle school players from Lawton Public Schools, Cache, Altus, Cyril and more went head to head to rack up points for a chance to get into the State Finals in December.

Tuesday’s qualifier and the state finals are hosted by the Oklahoma Scholastic eSports organization.

Although the students are playing a video game, the players and coaches take the game as seriously as anyone would a physical contact sport.

“We have practice once a week for 2 hours after school,” coach Philip Harrington said. “Then those practices we talk about strategy, we talk about mechanics, and things that they can do to improve their game play. They work on those all throughout the week and at practice, and then we get to see the results here. We have some of the best Smash players in the state here at Lawton Public Schools. Just on my team, we took 4th and 7th at state last year for a different league and middle school players took 1st and 2nd in the state, so Lawton has some really talented Smash players.”

Harrington said there are roughly 100 kids in the program at MacArthur and every middle and high school in Lawton has some sort of gaming program. He also said that eSports is also becoming a viable path to college, as colleges across Oklahoma are increasingly offering scholarships for their own programs.