Mario Kart Esports Team Kicks Off to a Successful Start

Have you ever wanted to start an esports team at Ohio Wesleyan? OWU’s first ever Mario Kart team was created this semester and quickly became a top-20 team in the country.

After registering in the Mario Kart esports league and competing in placement matches, OWU got placed in the third-highest division out of 7. While expectations were unknown when creating this team, OWU has made a name for itself in the Mario Kart esports world, beating big-name schools such as Oklahoma, Florida, the University of Southern Florida, and the University of North Carolina.

Creating a team and being able to compete in a league where teams have been together for years is not easy. Most Mario Kart teams that OWU has played against this year have regular practices and optimal gaming setups, whereas OWU’s team doesn’t hold practices and has a less-than-ideal setup for their players. Despite this, OWU has a real chance of making it to the Division 3 playoffs this year and looks to secure its first title in its first-ever year of competing.

While the team has been successful up to this point, there were many difficulties that OWU had to overcome when creating the team. There had to be enough game consoles, game cards, and places to play. OWU uses the esports arena in Welch Hall, which was able to provide two consoles and monitors to play on. However, this was still not enough, and players on the team had to use their own consoles. 

Senior captain and founder of the team, Rowan Kriebel, explained some of the challenges that he and his friends went through when creating a team.

“It was tough getting the resources to play,” Kriebel said. “We wanted to play a lot, but it took a couple of weeks to be able to get people to commit and find an actual way and place to be able to compete online with other teams.”

Finding a way to play was not the only difficulty that OWU faced when making the team. It was also hard to find people who would commit to joining this league and compete in a serious way. 

Gavin Stutz, a senior player on the team, found it difficult to join the team himself.

“For the longest time, starting this team was just a joke,” Stutz said. “We play Mario Kart all the time casually, and we’ve gotten pretty good, so we’d talk about playing together as a team, but we never really took it too seriously. Once we found out that it was a real possibility, though, it was tough deciding if this was something that I actually wanted to commit to.”

Stutz is already a student athlete and captain on the golf team, and spends a lot of his time preparing for the spring season.

“When I’m already focusing on school and preparing for golf, playing a video game competitively didn’t really seem like something I wanted to do in my last semester of college, to be completely honest. What really changed my mind was the fact that a lot of my best friends wanted me to join, and I figured it could be a good way of spending time with them, and now that the season has started, it’s been way more fun than I thought, and I don’t regret playing on the team at all.”