UI varsity Rocket League team takes on New York 

“We’re not going to qualify” was the main thought running through the minds of the three varsity Rocket League players. The qualifying tournaments were a double elimination, so they had two shots to make it in. They lost two games and got out of the first qualifier.  

One more shot.  

It was time to play their qualifying tournament and they told each other that, no matter what happened, it would be okay as long as they played their best. 

One, two, three games go by. They had won them all.  

They’re going to New York. 

“We got a ping on the Discord that we’re apart of for the league ECAC, that they’re hosting this tournament in New York,” said Garrett Britton, the coach of the Rocket League varsity and junior varsity teams. “In order to qualify, you had to play in a mini tournament to get to the big tournament [in New York], so we played in that.”  

For Seth Graham, a senior virtual technology and design major, this was his last semester playing for the team.  

From the start, neither Graham nor his teammates thought they’d make it to New York, but that didn’t stop them from trying.  

“A LAN event in New York? These potato people, we don’t know how to do that. That’s way out of our league,” Zach Callos, a sophomore accounting major, said.  

The game that qualified them was against a team they’d defeated a few times before. They went up against the University of Hartford and beat them once again. After winning, the team was in denial that they had actually won. They were triple checking, making sure that they were certain they had qualified.  

“Everyone was like, ‘You need to win the next one,’ but I was telling them, ‘No, we’re in the top six,’” Graham said.  

Even Wayne Ebenroth, the director of the Esports program, was in disbelief that they had made it. This was a big step for both the team and the program. The Esports program has been around for just over two years, and this is the first cross-country travel opportunity that they’ve had.  

So, it begged the question, “How do we get the funds to pay for it?”  

Ebenroth took the lead in searching for funding and received what they needed from the Department of Student Involvement.  

Flights were booked, an Airbnb picked out and a travel meeting was set for the day before they left.  

Early on Thursday, April 3, the team piled into Ebenroth’s Subaru Outback and set off for Spokane International Airport.  

They went through TSA, boarded the plane with no hiccups and set off on their connecting flight in Atlanta, Georgia.  

Once they landed in Atlanta, the problems began. 

“Plane two, in Atlanta, got super delayed,” Zach Callos said. “We pretty much landed in Atlanta about the time our plane to Albany was about to take off.”  

Ebenroth and Graham were convinced that they had missed their flight, and Zach Callos’s ticket now said their connecting flight would board the next day. Still sitting on the plane, they panicked and asked a flight attendant if they could get off first due to the delay. 

Despite the anxiety among the team members, Kevin Callos, Zach Callos’s dad, had no concerns whatsoever.  

“I was like, ‘Should we run?’ and he [Kevin Callos] was like, ‘Nope,’” Graham said. “We walked up to the gate, and it said boarding was closed, but he was like ‘Nah, we’re good.’” 

Kevin Callos’s calmness helped bring the group’s nerves back down, but there was still one issue: Where were Zach Callos and their other teammate, Logan Rutter? 

Zach Callos and Rutter didn’t make it onto the train with the rest of the team, so they had to sit back and wait for the next one to take them to their gate. 

“We were all together initially, but me and Logan, we didn’t happen to get on the train,” Zach Callos said. 

They caught the next train to their gate, and by some miracle, everyone boarded their connecting flight, and they set off for their final destination: Albany, New York. 

The orientation and tournament were held at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which is a private research institute in Troy, New York. 

“The venue was the coolest part initially,” Rutter said. “We drove up to it and it was like all this old-style architecture, and then there was this one building that stood out.” Most of the campus was comprised of older buildings, likely built in the 1800s, but in the heart of everything stood a modern style building that looked like a big glass cube.  

The whole building was dedicated to the tournament, which surprised the team. Many of them expected to be put up in little classrooms. 

“It was super cool to go inside and realize that this whole thing was for our event and that there are so many people here with the same ideas and the same interests,” Rutter said. 

Right away, there were people with cameras taking photos, and everything felt very official from the gate.  

When the time for the tournament came, the team felt very confident, despite getting put into a very difficult bracket. They were put with Wichita State University, Rochester Institute of Technology and University of Delaware. 

The seeding for the tournament was supposedly created due to goal differential in the qualifying matches, not number of games won, as the team had expected it to be. They were put up against some of the best teams in the tournament, and despite losing their games, they felt as though they had played really well. 

“The fact that we were in a brand-new place playing a game about car soccer that we really enjoy for some reason overshadowed the idea that we didn’t get the best grouping,” Zach Callos said. 

All members of the team saw the entire trip as a “win-win” situation regardless of the outcome of the tournament. If they won, it would be very fulfilling for them as a team, but if they lost, then they had an opportunity to go explore New York City together the next day.  

“Before seeing the bracket, it was always, ‘We’re going to New York,’ not just, ‘We’re going to a Rocket League tournament,’” Graham said.  

They had made some good connections with other teams, like Wichita State University, and left the tournament feeling good, despite their loss. 

The next day, the team was able to explore New York City, visiting Times Square, Central Park and specialty stores such as the LEGO store, Disney, Nintendo and even a sardine store.

When the day in New York City was over, the team took a train back to Albany. They spent the rest of the night preparing for their flight back to Moscow in the morning. Fortunately, the flight back home wasn’t nearly as close as the flight to Albany. Although they were tired and worn out from the trip, everyone made it back safely.  

From thinking that they’d never even make it to New York in the first place, to qualifying for the tournament, to exploring New York City and strengthening their friendships, the varsity Rocket League team created endless memories together that they’ll never forget. 

Brooklynn Jolley can be reached at [email protected]