Winthrop’s esports team becomes 1st college group to qualify for prestigious tournament

Five years ago, Winthrop started its esports program.

Now, it has reached heights that no other college program has reached before.

Known as Winthrop University Valorant (WUVal), the team recently became the first collegiate team to qualify for Valorant Challengers 2024, according to the team’s post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

On the game’s website, Valorant is described as “a 5v5 character-based tactical FPS (first-person shooter) where precise gunplay meets unique agent abilities.”

Valorant Challengers is just a step below Valorant Champions, a tournament where professional teams compete against one another in Valorant for a prize pool of over $2 million.

“I’ve been trying to explain it to people as it’s kind of like the G League to the NBA,” said Josh Sides, Winthrop head esports coach. “Some of the teams are affiliated with pro teams, some of them are their own independent team. Either way, it’s the second-tier of professional competition. Still very, very high-level competition and something not many teams get the opportunity to compete in.”

Winthrop secured its spot in Valorant Challengers through the first round of open qualifying for Split 1 of the Challengers tournament, competing in best of three matches.

WUVal won four of its five matches from Jan. 31 to Feb. 3 to secure this spot, including a 2-0 sweep of Thinking Men in the lower bracket qualifying final. Winthrop is one of four teams who are advancing to the next round.

Winthrop competes in the North American region, which encompasses teams from the United States and Canada.

Freshman Justin Milani, a.k.a “Jerk,” is one of three members of WUVal who are new to the school.

He said that he’s glad that the team still managed to come together and perform at a high level to achieve something that had never been done before.

“We have to spend a lot of time practicing as well as our classes,” the British Columbia, Canada, native said. “We have to do a little bit of catching up because a lot of these professional teams, they’ve been in the circuit for a year or two years. They’ve been playing together, and we’re a newer team, so we have to play a bit of a catch-up game.”

The WUVal team, which is comprised of Milani, sophomore Andrew “Gucc107” Gutnichenko, junior Eishan “Nahsie” Jaffer, freshman Philip “Infiltrator” Nguyen and senior Gabriel “Moobs” Powell, spends a lot of time together outside of competitive gaming.

They eat meals together regularly and often find themselves playing card games to help blow off some steam. Milani said that gives the group an edge over most of the teams they come across.

“(Most of our opponents are) all online,” Milani said. “Or they’ll boot camp once every couple months, whereas we get that kind of experience every single day. And I think it’ll help us even more when it comes to in-person events because we’re already used to hanging around each other. We’ve seen how it gets when we lose (compared to) a lot of these online teams who’ve never met each other before or they meet each other twice a year. And that’s that.”

Sides has seen how much the esports program has grown at Winthrop, to the point that high schools like Cannon School out of Concord, North Carolina, are coming by to tour the new facility at the Lowenstein Building.

The program is able to offer scholarships to recruit top-tier players and nurture that talent into championships and trophies.

The sky is the limit for Winthrop esports, but Sides can’t help but feel like he’s already standing at the top of the hill.

“We have players reaching out to us who want to come to Winthrop,” Sides said. “We’ll find players who are interested in coming to Winthrop as well. I would say Winthrop is probably the top program in collegiate esports right now. A lot of players, if they’re interested in any way of going collegiate, Winthrop is their number one team they want to compete for. That’s only very, very recently, like as recently as this year, been the case, and I think it’s a lot to be said about the administration’s buy in and the school’s buy in. And players see that.”

Winthrop won’t continue its run until next month with the second round of open qualifying being held from Feb. 13-15.