Philip Harrington knew fairly quickly that the Tenino High School “Rocket League” esports team could be a championship contender.
After all, he understands what it takes to build a championship team. Harrington came to Tenino last year from Oklahoma, where he developed multiple state and national championship-winning esports programs.
His vision for the Tenino squad was ultimately correct.
The quartet of freshman captain Dawson Williams, eighth grader Weston Frank, eighth grader Nathan Pye and junior Eric Bowe Jr. took home the top prize in “Rocket League” at the Washington state Scholastic Esports Association High School State Championships on Sunday at the Lynnwood Event Center.
The Beavers competed in three different best-of-five matches through the playoffs for a total of 13 games to claim the trophy. Tenino swept Silas in three games, outlasted Selah in five games and triumphed over reigning back-to-back champion Kennedy Catholic in five games.
“They are organized, motivated self-starters,” Harrington said of his team. “Skill and talent will only get you so far. Dedication, teamwork and cooperation are what win matches. More often than not, we won against players this weekend who are, on paper, better than us.”
In his sixth year as an esports coach, Harrington said he had never seen dedication from a student athlete like Williams, who created a spreadsheet in the dawn of the regular season to track competitive rankings of all the players he could find information about.
“He wanted to scout ahead and see what opposition we had coming up so they could better prepare for each weekend,” Harrington said. “This is my sixth year as an esports coach, and I’ve had very few students over that time that would have, on their own, gone and made an organized spreadsheet. He’s one in a million.”
Williams knew the competition would be stiff throughout the season, but the Beavers had a hardworking bunch that had put in many hours of practice at school and late at night in pursuit of glory en route to a perfect 10-0 record.
“After I saw everybody’s rankings with the spreadsheet I made, I figured out that we were one of the best teams. All of our starters were all top 10, and Eric wasn’t too far behind,” Williams said.
Each teammate credited Pye for their interest in playing “Rocket League” as Pye is the top-ranked player in the state.
“Nathan is sort of the reason all of us are in ‘Rocket League.’ He helped teach me how to play ‘Rocket League’ early on, which made it more fun for me to continue on,” Williams said.
Bowe, the team’s alternate, said Frank and Williams passed on what they learned from Pye, and the starters praised Bowe for his contributions during the state playoffs.
“Dawson and Weston put me through the ringer and sat with me for almost three hours just grinding ‘Rocket League’ and showing me what I need to learn and what I should do,” Bowe said.
The Beavers were motivated during the state competition by their friends and parents in attendance cheering them on, especially in the championship-clinching match. With so much on the line, the players enjoyed the experience playing alongside each other at the highest level.
“It was an awesome experience. There was a lot of pressure, but because of Dawson’s spreadsheets, we knew they had some pretty good players,” Pye said.
Harrington was proud of how his team handled the pressure and communicated efficiently through the ups and downs of the long day of competition.
“In the middle of a match, what you’re thinking about is the plays going on in the match in front of you and literally nothing else. There’s no room in your head for nerves,” he said. “We’ve drilled really hard that the play that just happened is over and move on. We just focus on the now.”
The young team is hungry for more trophies to add to their collection and instill fear in opposing teams.
“We’re going to have to do so much grinding over the summer,” Frank said.
Harrington’s goal with the program is to push the players competitively and give them opportunities to pursue not only competition in the state and across the country but also potentially at the collegiate level.
“I want schools to be like, ‘Oh no, Tenino is here. We’re going to have a hard time winning,’ but I also want them to be like, ‘Oh great, Tenino is here. They’re a bunch of great people and great sportsmen,’” Harrington said. “I want us to have both a feared and loved reputation: feared as competitors and loved as young people and student athletes.”
Centralia High School’s “Super Smash Bros: Ultimate” team placed third at the state championships, bouncing back from a shutout loss to Southridge in the semifinals to beat Nooksack in the third-place match.
