Lockdown favours the esport brave
Five local youngsters have put their lockdown time to good use, having represented South Africa as part of Oakhill’s Team Theory in three international online gaming matches, and winning one against Namibia.
Team Theory started playing competitively for the Oakhill Club in 2017, serving as the club’s only team that plays Dota 2, a multiplayer online battle arena video game that is played only on PC platforms.
“The players are dedicated, and they love the game,” said Oakhill’s head of the esports programme, Diana Barnard. “They have participated in numerous esports events in the last few years and the team has rightfully earned a good reputation as a force to be reckoned with.”
The team is made up of five players all aged 18 years or younger, making it a very young and slightly inexperienced side when compared to other international teams. Captain Lourens Kok, Ryan Shearer, Simon Shearer, James Armstrong and Chris Coetzee make up the side, with Lourens the only player who is out of high school while his team members are all still enrolled in Oakhill.
“He is the captain of the team because he is the best person for that position. He is the calming factor in the team which is good because things can get quite heated during a match,” Barnard said.
“His calm demeanour also rubs off on the other players. He has saved the day/match on many occasions with his intelligent, calm and collected approach to the game.”
Team Theory is SA’s best Dota 2 by a long shot, so on 25 April they donned their SA colours as Lourens and his troops geared up to take on Namibia in the first of their three matches, an opposition that had one-upped SA at the World Championships last year.
“The Namibian team was very confident that they were going to beat this SA team consisting of players 18 years and younger. Well, did they get a big surprise! Or should I say shock?” Barnard said. “It was clear from the start that the youngsters meant business. They outsmarted and outplayed the Namibian team from the word go, and convincingly won both games in the match.”
Unfortunately for the team, that was the end of their good fortune for the lockdown period, as they lost both of their subsequent matches against Azerbaijan and Peru respectively.
“These were much more difficult than we had expected since we were playing against players who had much more experience playing the game than we did,” Lourens said. Even though he was effectively the SA captain, this didn’t change the make-up of the team according to Lourens.
“It didn’t make any difference to me being the captain of the team because everyone in the team has the same amount of input as I do with regard to any decision that is made in and out of the game.”
He also feels that lockdown has in a sense been kind to the players. “I would say that lockdown has given us the chance to improve since there hasn’t been much else to do with the spare time on our hands,” he said. “I would say that this was the case for the rest of the team as well.”
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Source: Knysna Plett Herald News