In quarantine, traditional athletes have seen little progress when it comes to the return of sports. That’s where Adam Flick, a junior, comes in. Adam is not an ordinary athlete. Instead of grinding at the gym or putting on his cleats, he puts on his headset and gets his fingers ready as a competitive Overwatch player for the WHS Esports team.
The new WHS Esports Team, founded by Aansh Sharma & Tanav Mylavaram from the WHS Gaming Club, was looking for recruits for their new Overwatch Division. Both entities, the WHS Gaming Club/Esports Team and the High School Esports League (HSEL), were in a hurry since deadlines for signing up for the team were due in a very short amount of time. This was a problem since WHS Esports was created literally right before the deadline. Luckily, Hunter Putman, also a junior, was appointed by the WHSGC to recruit people for the new team. Putman discovered Flick as well as enough other athletes to fill up an entire team, and the WHSGC Overwatch division was well on its way.
Flick originally started playing Overwatch with his friends two years ago, around the time of the game’s original launch. He also played a lot of the game during quarantine, since he had nothing else to do at the time. Soon after the WHS Esports Overwatch team started, they realized they needed a captain. Naturally, Flick was voted captain because of his advanced skills. Flick’s teammate, Jack Ten Bosch, a junior, says “Not only does Adam have raw talent, he’s smart with callouts in intense fights and is funny as well.” Another teammate, sophomore Aadish Iyer said, “I think Adam is a great player and a big help for our team. Instead of being cocky because he’s more than three ranks above us, he plays with the team, fragging out the most important players and making our life easier.” Aadish continues by saying that “Adam excels at his mechanics, but at his level, mechanics isn’t a problem, its teamwork and coordination, something we, as a team, are capable of.”
According to Flick, at first operations were hasty since the deadlines for the league they were trying to enter, HSEL, were very strict, but eventually everyone recruited for the Overwatch team successfully signed up for HSEL & WHS Esports. Once that obstacle was overcome, he began to realize the potential the WHS Esports team has, especially in the quarantine setting and the years to come. Furthermore, Flick believes he can “help create opportunities for students who may want to play video games competitively” at WHS, potentially legitimizing Esports as an actual talent-based sport in the near future.
Aansh Sharma is a junior at Washington High School. He grew up in Munich, Germany and Mumbai, India and then Fremont, California. This is his first year at the Hatchet. His interests are running the Gaming Club and reporting on the local news. He also likes to play video games. He would like to get a job in Computer Science to allow him to support himself. While Computer Science seems boring, he will try to have fun with it despite that, and also distract himself with gaming sometimes.