History

I wanted a place for kids to live out their dreams and maybe one day be professionals at the game.

We had a lot of students who were really cracked at the games that they played, and we also wanted to try to find common ground with people who liked what we liked. EGS (Electronic Gaming Society, another student-run club at RIT for gamers) wasn’t similar enough, and finding people who were like-minded in a safe-space who wanted to do what I wanted to do was super important to me. One of my other dreams was to build an environment within the school to create a place for students to be able to do something big. We wanted to make sure that we had that opportunity after we left to prepare us for the world to come - our “Training Arc'' per say! At the end of the day, we wanted to play games. We wanted to bring that experience that I felt going to majors, and other large tournaments, to this school.

I initially joined because a lot of my friends joined, I thought to myself “I like video games, I’ll join!”

I wanted to become president because when I was in the club, I first got started as a community team member (what the Operations Branch was back then). My friend, Ron Dodge, was the person who made the old RIT Tiger logo (shoutout Ron!) and Jacob Marcovecchio was one of the many people who believed that I would make a good president. At the time that I had joined the club, there was someone on the Eboard who I thought wasn’t doing everything they could, and I wanted to help the club reach the heights that I knew it could. There was a lot in those early years that we didn’t have, like a fleshed-out constitution, which I oversaw the rewriting of. I had the confidence that I knew I could do a better job than the previous E-board members before me, and thought I could make the club succeed and grow more so than it was already. I’d like to believe that I was very influential in my roles as treasurer and secretary. I got a lot of stuff done, and planned on doing more as president, but unfortunately covid stopped a lot of that. The club for me was very socially-oriented and was something that I wanted to foster further than what I had seen in my time there. I believe and wish I could’ve done more while being president, but being so involved in RIT Esports and being so involved in the club was something that I had not originally thought I would be involved in during my time at RIT but having been through the experience, I’m very glad I did. For anyone looking to join RIT Esports, there’s various ways to get involved, even if you’re not competitive! Being involved in club life, specifically RIT Esports, heightened my college experience and I would heavily recommend it to anyone looking to join!

I knew that there was an opportunity here that we could build something new and different from other schools.

When I graduated, I wanted to cheer for an Overwatch team and I wanted others to have that same opportunity to do so. Other schools threw “Esports” at the end of their gaming clubs, but I wanted to fully mimic something that I was seeing professionally, showcasing what RIT was made of to everybody else. RIT was the perfect fit for this; I was confident that we could build something better than a gaming club, and my hope was that RIT would eventually be known for this. Furthermore, I wanted to build an online community that I could be excited about, not just for me, but for the generations of students who would come to school after me. We knew that there was an aggressive demand for this and worked to capture those demands and turn them into a place in which people could come together to support players and cheer for them. I’m proud to say that we grew to one of the largest organizations on campus in under two years. You also may have heard of “Jersey Day” which I helped to incorporate - seeing hundreds of people wear RIT Esports merchandise, some of whom I’d never seen before, was a surreal experience. That’s when it hit me, that we had succeeded in creating the community I had aspired to make.