How Davenport University has made history with college CS:GO team Davenport UniversityDavenport University made history as the first fully collegiate squad to qualify for CS:GO\u2019s ESL Challenger League in North America. It marks a historic moment for college esports and has been years in the making at the private institution out of Michigan. In the ESL Challenger League Season 41 Relegation tournament on July 12, Davenport University was fighting for their tournament lives in the lower bracket. The players on this CS:GO team were playing in the online tournament from their various homes across the country, attempting a final push into the next level of North American competition, the ESL Challenger League, after placing third in the ESEA Advanced league. Davenport sophomore Collin \u2018CoJoMo\u2019 Moren himself was competing from Alabama in what he described as a \u201cscuffed\u201d setup, with an old desk, metal folding chair, and terrible internet. Colin Graham, Davenport University\u2019s esports program director, watched on Twitch as the team lost the match to Northern Forces 2-0. \u201cThe energy was just kind of waning, I think they had been playing and practicing so much that they were just kind of hitting their limit,\u201d Graham said in an interview with Dexerto. Davenport failed to qualify for the Challenger League, one of the biggest competitions in North America, a region that has been hit hard by the exodus of talent and organizations to Valorant. The team was bummed, but the program was ready to bounce back and fight through the Advanced division again for another shot at collegiate esports history. \u201cWe were very disappointed with that,\u201d CoJoMo told Dexerto. \u201cWe were very disappointed and it was demoralizing. But I think we kind of just realized the bigger picture,\u201d CoJoMo said. That disappointment didn\u2019t last long, however, as about two weeks later, on August 3, the team saw the Davenport University logo along with that of storied teams Evil Geniuses and MIBR for the upcoming edition of the Challenger League. After some initial confusion on how they had made it in due to various teams dropping out, and if they would still need to play a qualification match against Unjustified gaming, ESL later let both teams into the Challenger League. \u201cIt was just a roller coaster of emotion,\u201d CoJoMo said about the saga. Davenport became the first fully collegiate roster to make it into ESL Challenger after three years of competition that started in the no-man\u2019s land that is the open division. The squad was heralded online and congratulated for hitting such a significant milestone in college esports. \u201cThis is insane for collegiate esports,\u201d Graham said. \u201cI never thought we were going to be here. I thought we were going to be a League of Legends school when I started.\u201d How Davenport University built up its CS:GO program Graham joined Davenport\u2019s program in 2019 as an assistant League of Legends coach and quickly rose up to run the entire department. Once at the top, he polled the school to see what kind of interest he could find in the student body for specific esports and quickly found out that first-person shooters were a hit. \u201cLet\u2019s just offer everything, let\u2019s throw everything at the wall and see what sticks,\u201d Graham said. \u201cAnd we ended up having a couple Rainbow Six players come up\u2026 and a group of about five students, including current Davenport students, came up to me with interest in Counter-Strike.\u201d The team saw some success in 2019, but the program only started to pick up in 2020 due to the global health crisis and esports being almost the only source of competition that kept going during that time. At the start, Graham instituted a culture in the team of sticking together and competing for a common goal. Unlike in other college esports programs, every player on Davenport only competes for the school and is required to be on campus (except during the summer, when they compete from their homes) and maintain a 2.0-2.5 grade point average. In other programs, players might be splitting time between playing for the collegiate squad and competing for other teams. They might also just sign up for one remote class at a college to play on their team. But when players commit to Davenport University, they can only play for the institution and are required to attend in-person classes. Their current Division 1 squad (Davenport University has three CS teams), has competed at LAN tournaments together as well as in ESEA league matches. \u201cI think that a lot of people take collegiate CS as a joke because a lot of players are doing it as their secondary team,\u201d CoJoMo said. \u201cThere are a lot of players in ECL that also play on their collegiate teams, and it makes the whole collegiate scene suffer because it\u2019s hard to put together teams, and there\u2019s just so much inconsistency about which players are able to play or when they\u2019re going to be able to play, and the collegiate scene struggles a lot because of that.\u201d The next piece of the puzzle for their success was bringing on Colin \u2018koi\u2019 Thor as their CS:GO head coach. The former MOUZ assistant coach and analyst has brought a level of expertise and mentorship that the program desperately needed, to the point that Graham let him run the ship. \u201cMy stance with him, and my relationship, is, \u2018I\u2019m going to let you spread your wings and do what you need to do,\u2019\u201d Graham said about koi. From there, the squad worked their way to where they are now. Even if they didn\u2019t really reach the ECL in the traditional way, the squad put themselves in a position to qualify and have the culture that has kept them together \u2014 a rarity in the region, even at the highest level. The future of Davenport University in CS Qualifying for ECL is not what Davenport wants to be their peak. The school has teams in other esports, with the same culture and qualifications, and is bringing in international students to bolster its CS squad. The school is also planning on adding a women\u2019s team to its ranks in the near future. Making history brings with it a level of notoriety and bargaining power with the institution and outside companies, according to Graham. Counter-Strike currently gets the lion\u2019s share of the university budget, Graham said, and almost all of it is going to growing the program \u2014 which includes the construction of an expanded esports facility for the fall semester \u2014 and developing their current players. \u201cI think the stance is that we want to use Davenport as a way to bring in young, talented individuals from around North America and give them a place to be successful and to grow and develop as CS:GO players,\u201d Graham said. While Davenport has yet to see a player go pro after graduating, it is not out of the realm of possibility for its current class of students and coaches. As for their chances in ECL, the team expects a challenge, but CoJoMo thinks it\u2019s nothing they can\u2019t handle. \u201cI think that we\u2019re going to surprise a lot of people and I could even see us making playoffs and showing what is possible in collegiate esports,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How Davenport University has made history with college CS:GO team Davenport UniversityDavenport University made history as the first fully collegiate squad to qualify for CS:GO\u2019s ESL Challenger League in North America. It marks a historic moment for college esports and has been years in the making at the private institution out of Michigan. In the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38426\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}