You might hear something that sounds more like the inside of a sports broadcast than a school hallway if you walk into Calvert Hall College High School in Towson, Maryland on a typical afternoon. Put on your headsets. glowing monitors. squads of three players announcing plays with the accuracy of a football huddle. However, no one is wearing pads. The Cardinals are ranked second out of 111 teams nationwide and are participating in Rocket League drills.
Sitting with that number for a while is worthwhile. 111 teams. a nationally recognized team from a Maryland Catholic all-boys prep school. participating in a sport that was once completely written off as a pastime disguised as athletics.
The program began when over 80 students attended a single interest meeting in the spring of last year; even the organizers were clearly taken aback by the turnout. Such a turnout is not an accident. It occurs when pupils feel that something is at last being created for them. In response, Calvert Hall built a 1,300-square-foot esports space with 23 PC gaming stations, four console stations, and big-screen TVs. Alumnus Steve Martin, Studio Head of Firaxis Games, the Maryland-based company that created the Civilization franchise, provided the $75,000 seed money. He called his participation “completely unexpected.” Simply put, a conversation at his 40th reunion had piqued his interest. That intriguing space was transformed into what most people would consider to be a room worthy of a Division I university.
Coach Paul McMullen, who has taught English at Calvert Hall for more than 20 years, has emerged as the program’s unlikely but powerful motivator. His lack of experience as a traditional coach could actually work to his advantage. In ways that coaches of traditional sports seldom have to think about, he has given careful thought to what makes competitive gaming challenging. “Most of our students have never played these games as part of a consistent team,” he stated. “Most of the time video games are played as a single individual getting randomly partnered with strangers on the internet.”
According to McMullen, the main coaching challenge is breaking that habit—becoming a player who runs a coordinated team strategy instead of chasing personal highlights. It’s not all that different from what any basketball coach deals with a gifted freshman who dominates the ball.
The demands of the games themselves are higher than most outsiders would anticipate. Played with rocket-powered cars, Rocket League is structured similarly to soccer and demands constant team communication and split-second spatial reasoning. In a recent game, senior Garrett Arrowood stepped away from his regular Overwatch role to cover for a missing teammate on a Rocket League team and contributed to a 3-1 victory. Regarding what would have happened otherwise, his coach was straightforward: “It makes it extremely difficult to win.” A different Calvert Hall team, meanwhile, won their game in overtime thanks to a golden goal from Slade Lippy in the first seven seconds. In the fall, that team had already taken home the PlayVS Eastern Region title.
When discussing his players’ skill sets, McMullen uses the same language as a track coach when talking about sprinters. coordination between the hands and eyes. speed of processing. mid-match strategic flexibility. review of a movie. In order to spot trends and devise counterstrategies, Calvert Hall examines both their own and their opponents’ game footage. “We analyze game film, not only of our own teams, but if we can find film of our opponents,” McMullen stated. People who still consider esports to be passive entertainment seem to have never seen a competitive team analyze opponent tendencies on a whiteboard.
What Calvert Hall is constructing is supported by the surrounding environment. More than 31,000 students participate in esports across 22 states, according to the NFHS, and that number only includes states where the sport is officially recognized as a varsity sport. Over 3,100 schools are governed by the High School Esports League alone. There are now 260 schools in the National Association of Collegiate eSports. The pipeline from high school to college competition is no longer theoretical, but it’s still unclear when traditional athletic departments will fully adopt esports on an equal footing. It is real.
Calvert Hall appears to recognize that a competitive spirit exists outside of a field, something that some schools continue to oppose. It occasionally resides in a 1,300-square-foot space with a team that recently won a regional championship and glowing monitors.
