Seton Hall men’s basketball and the transfer portal have drawn plenty of attention, but there’s another program on campus that recently had some major postseason success.
This month has already been a monumental one for SHU Esports. Following a strong spring regular season, the program captured two BIG EAST championships and advanced all five of its varsity teams to national postseason competition.
This includes a team dedicated to Super Smash Brothers Ultimate, Overwatch, Valorant, League of Legends (LoL) and Rocket League, with the latter two being the ones to earn their respective conference titles—both in dramatic fashion.
En route to their third and fifth conference titles in team history, respectively, both teams overcame series deficits.
The Rocket League team, which went undefeated in the regular season (7-0) after failing to win a single game last semester, faced two considerable deficits before their eventual 4-3 series win over UConn. The win earned them an automatic bid to “May Madness” at the Collegiate Esports Commissioners Cup (CECC) held in Arlington, Texas.
“They had us down 2-0 at first,” said freshman finance major Gianluca “dkon” Nese, a starter on the Rocket League team. “Then we won the next two, so it was like, ‘Alright, we’re good.’”
“But then they won the fifth game [to take a 3-2 lead], so if they won the game after this, they win,” Nese added. “So we just had to really come up with some strategies to counteract them, and eventually we won 4-3.”
Nese, who started playing Rocket League in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, attributes the team’s success to the program’s manager, Victor Gomez, as well as the team’s coach, Antonio “Tone” Riozzi, an alumnus of the program who recruited Nese during his senior year at Morris Knolls High School after an unlikely meeting.
“I was just playing normal Rocket League one day…[and] I just got into a game with [Riozzi],” Nese said. “And I was just like, ‘Hey, are you the Seton Hall coach?’ and he was like, ‘Yeah’ …and eventually I committed here under scholarship.”
Adjacent to the Rocket League team, overcoming a series deficit was the LoL team, who found themselves down 1-0 to St. John’s before earning an eventual 2-1 series win. The win advanced the Pirates, now ranked among the top-32 teams in the nation, to the College League of Legends (CLOL) national championship contention.
Kiran “Azreal” Natarajan, a sophomore triple major in mathematics, physics and engineering, a self-dubbed “big math guy” and the first on the LoL team to be on scholarship, mentioned how Rocket League winning their title beforehand gave his team additional motivation to do the same.
“We knew that Rocket League won, and now it’s like we’re carrying more than just our ambitions—we’re playing for everyone else too,” Natarajan said. “There’s no greater feeling than to come together as a group of five to focus everything on the one thing and to come out successful.”
Natarajan, who has been playing LoL since he was six years old, also came to the defense of esports, which many claim isn’t a sport despite being recognized by several universities and the NCAA as such.
“We say basketball’s a sport, softball’s a sport, volleyball, baseball, because you’re doing something physically active,” Natarajan said. “But I think it’s less about what you’re doing—it’s more about what you get from it, what you actually think it is.”
Natarajan drew upon his experience playing a more “physically demanding” sport, having been on SHU’s men’s swimming and diving team just last year.
“From sports, you get community, you get responsibilities, dreams, aspirations, you get to feel the rush of giving your all into anything and everything at every moment that you compete,” Natarajan added. “So I think in esports you get the exact same thing: you get the sense of community, you learn to be disciplined…you really do get the same things out of it.”
For both teams, overcoming such deficits made the title win all the more meaningful.
“I was jumping up and down, I was hugging people tight, I was dapping people up across the railings,” said fellow sophomore Brett “Khazixtyeight” McLaughlin, an exercise science major and LoL team captain.
“It was just a big relief off our shoulders,” McLaughlin added. “St. John’s did beat us in the regular season, and we were feeling like, ‘Can we really do this?’ and so when it actually happened, it was just euphoria.”
As captain, McLaughlin explained how his role on the team is far demanding, which he actually embraces and even relishes.
“I enjoy pressure—I feel like I’m someone who lives for the big moments,” McLaughlin said. “All four of my teammates are trusting the call I make, and if it's not the correct call, we will lose.”
Although the team’s designated “shot-caller,” McLaughlin stressed that for the team to have success, everyone has to be in sync—something that had to be addressed in a “players’ meeting” weeks before they captured the conference title.
“We really weren’t on the same page as a team, and we really needed a candid meeting,” McLaughlin said. “So we just had a conversation about each other: we listed each other's flaws, we listed each other’s pros and cons, and it absolutely worked.”
Like McLaughlin, Gomez also described the scene and feelings of the players after both teams’ wins as one of pure bliss.
“It was an incredibly palpable amount of emotion amongst the players the moment they realized they won,” Gomez said. “The cheers, the hugs, the high-fives, the chest bumps, the ‘Take that's’—all that jazz I really do enjoy.”
The team’s conference postseason success was made all the more meaningful for Gomez given the fundamental, if not essential, role he played in the program’s development.
As a freshman at SHU in 2013—the same year the United States officially recognized esports players as professional athletes—Gomez joined the Seton Hall Gaming Sector Club, which was less than a year old.
“At that time, League of Legends was really coming to prominence,” Gomez said. “So I ended up showing up to a meeting…and the next thing I knew, they were like, ‘You know about video games and computers—run it.’”
After graduating in 2017, having helped the club grow and gain greater recognition from the university, Gomez came back to The Hall the next year as the assistant director of scheduling and operations.
Around that time, Gomez explained, the NCAA had just concluded a meeting where they decided esports would be a future endeavor of theirs, with SHU following suit.
“Of course, I yap a lot about video games,” Gomez said. “So when it came time to ask who on this campus should lead this initiative, my name came up.”
“So I did esports management pro bono from 2018-2021 alongside my full-time job,” Gomez added. “Then in 2021, I took on this role full-time.”
In the time since, Gomez has been at the forefront of all the university’s esports endeavors, including the creation of a state-of-the-art esports lab located on the fifth floor of Jubilee Hall.
With 33 desktop computers designed specifically for gaming, McLaughlin described the lab as “one of the highest quality labs probably in the country.”
Gomez, meanwhile, described it as a dream come true.
“We went from dreaming about what could be to just having surpassed 58,000 hours of usage in this lab,” Gomez said.
Being part of the program from the very beginning, Gomez further reflected on how far things have come since his time as a student.
“We went from six people playing around a round table on wifi on battery because we didn’t know any better,” Gomez said. “To now for the third time being top-32 in the nation, winning our third BIG EAST title for LoL, our fifth BIG EAST title for Rocket League [and] preparing for our 11th and 12th national appearance, respectively.”
“So it’s been incredible growth,” Gomez added. “And I can firmly say that that could not have happened without the incredible support of the institution, but also the incredible students that we’ve been able to have as a part of this program.”
Following their conference postseason success, Gomez said he expects the teams “to run into some giants” on the national stage, but that he feels such will be a worthwhile experience for the players nonetheless.
“I think that we’re going to run into some stiff competition,” Gomez said. “But I do think that it is imperative that our players go through this experience so that next time they get here, they’re even more ready.”
“The fact that they get to stand on that stage, to put their name in the history books, [and say,] ‘We were here, the Pirates we’re here,’ is something invaluable to me,” Gomez added. “And I hope it is invaluable to them as well.”
Zachary Mawby is the head editor of The Setonian’s Sports section. He can be reached at zachary.mawby@student.shu.edu.
