The Niles West Valorant eSports team competed Tuesday in the Valorant finals. Going into the state finals, they were ranked number two out of 120 schools but fell short of advancing to nationals.

Valorant is a competitive character-based shooter video game with around 18.6 million active players.  The game has two teams of five, offensive and defensive. It requires high-speed reaction times, and  takes place on different maps where teams strategy and collaboration are key to success and has a menu of agents with unique abilities and roles they fulfill in-game.  The Niles West Valorant Esports team is composed of the five best players at the school.

Ahead of the state competition, team member and senior Kaleb Bonjoc was happy about his team’s performance.

“I was really satisfied.  [The team] had a lot of confidence going in because we did end up in a higher bracket and we compared ourselves to the other players; we were thinking our play styles go well with our character picks and we have great communication so we weren’t really worried until finals,” Bonjoc said.

The process of preparing for this took hours of practice and gaming every week.  The team practices by scrimmaging against high school and collegiate teams on a platform called Gankster.

“The students run the practices and they know the game better than me so I let them lead and organize themselves so that they can take leadership and then I just encourage them to practice as much as they can and I’m always there to supervise their games every week,” eSports sponsor and science teacher Ali Sayed said.

Bonjoc believes that the team’s camaraderie both in person and online was essential to their success in-game.

“[The team] actually has a lot of great chemistry.  In person, we all know each other pretty well.  Jaden Kim, our in-game leader, makes a lot of great calls, and our best player Vincent Charles, is [in the] top 150 [Valorant players] in North America.  I think we also have really great communication and we do our best to keep a good mental state; we always try to stay positive,” Bonjoc said.

Team member and senior Abdullah Chaudhry employs strategies to facilitate communication and the team and aid their success.

“You have to not get mad or angry at your teammates; just keep a cool mind and that will really help you to think better and perform better,” Chaudhry said.

This was the eSports team’s third trip to the state finals since its first year at West in 2020-2021.