The St. Edward’s Call of Duty esports team notched another win against Nicholls University’s Colonel esports this past Monday, Feb. 12, after starting the season on Feb. 5 with a 3-1 win against Texas A&M Maroon, and a 3-0 sweep on Feb. 8 to South Arkansas University.
The team also recently became certified Division 1, the only sport at St. Edward’s to do so.
“It was fairly simple,” Lucas “Ballah” Muccio said. “We played two teams that just simply, we should beat every single time, pretty handedly. We took care of business and qualified.”
As promised last semester, the team has expanded to playing in three separate leagues. This match was played in the College CoD Premier League (CCL).
“Playing these three leagues, it definitely is quite a bit, but it lets us play as a team more, lets us improve as a team more and really shows what we have,” Ballah said.
Call of Duty matches are played over three different playstyles, and the first team to garner three overall round wins takes the game.
The match, which kicked off at 6:30 p.m., started with playstyle Hardpoint on map Rio. Hardpoint consists of teams competing to gain control of an objective area during the map, where, uncontested, a team will accumulate one point per second. The first team to 250 points wins the round. Ballah picked up the first kill, and the Hilltoppers grabbed an early lead at 37-0. Colonel esports retaliated and almost brought the game to a tie at 47-43. St. Edward’s answered back and recaptured the area to up their score to 70-54. With 3 minutes left on the clock, the score was a close 134-82. The two teams then fought back and forth, each gaining points in the objective area. St. Edward’s won the match at 250-160, with team captain Johnny “Vanity” Albano on the top of the leaderboard with 30 kills and a 1:14 time, an overall 114 points, spent capturing the uncontested Hardpoint.
The next playstyle, Search & Destroy, consists of both teams switching sides to either attack or defend two different bombs on the map. Additionally, each player only has one life and no revives. Hilltoppers had a rocky start and lost the first two rounds playing on map Invasion. David “Eons” Sauseda got a double kill in the third round, ultimately leading to a St. Edward’s win for a 1-2 record. Unfortunately, they couldn’t garner any momentum and ended up losing the four remaining rounds and lost the match 1-6.
The third match was playstyle Control played on map Invasion. Similar to playstyle Hardpoint, teams must either capture or defend two points, respectively “A” and “B,” on the map without running out of respawns. Each team is given 30 respawns for the match. In the first round, Hilltoppers were attacking, and Ballah captured point “B”, however, their respawns got disabled and they lost in the final seconds of the round. In the second round, they defended point “A” and won to tie up the round 1-1. The team captured both points in the following round, and Vanity had a 10-kill killstreak by the end of the round. Eons followed in the next round with a five-kill killstreak, and the team protected point “A” to win Control 3-1.
For the fourth round, the teams replayed Hardpoint on map Skidrow. With four minutes left, St. Edward’s was trailing 59-62. The teams went back and forth, with Hilltoppers getting the score up to 83-80, and later stretching the lead to 188-112. Nicholls had a late comeback and pushed up to 246-221. That could not stop the Hilltoppers, though; St. Edward’s won with a final score of 250-235. Mauricio “Thresh” Pallares topped the leaderboard with 25 kills and a 1:31 time, earning the team 131 points, in Hardpoint.
The match advances SEU to a 3-0 record in the southeast bracket of the CCL League. Their upcoming games can be found on the CCL schedule.
