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Mountain Vista High Captures Inaugural Splatoon Title in Esports

Mountain Vista High Captures Inaugural Splatoon Title in Esports
Jamie Debartolomeis

Mountain Vista High School's Drew Plug, Grace Frye, Joe Buck and Owen Lamb won 3-0 over Lakewood in the championship match to claim Colorado’s first-ever Splatoon 3 title and the school’s first-ever esports championship!

“Not all games under the esports umbrella work well for competitive gaming,” said Mountain Vista Esports Coach Mike Lee. “There are millions of games out there and only 10-20 games work well for competitive gaming at the high school level. Splatoon 3 is one of those games!”

Splatoon 3 is a 4 vs 4 game that involves a lot of teamwork, strategy, communication and near-endless practice. Each player needs to play their role, make correct in-moment choices, communicate what the other team is doing, counter the other team and contribute to their team's effort to win the round. For the team to win, they must win a best of five-rounds match. Each round the team is doing a different event, similar to gymnastics in a way. If they win the majority of the five rounds, they win the match. 

“We’ve just been doing this a couple of years and we’ve been lucky to have some awesome kids,” said Lee. “We’ve tried to make it all about them and let them take control from designing our logo to our jerseys. Even the code of conduct was largely influenced by our students and their thoughts on it. We’re lucky enough to have an amazing group of four kids who weren’t friends a couple of years ago and now they’re best buddies.”

Esports has a season just like any other sport. If you win enough games, you get into the playoffs and are ranked. 

“We went undefeated through the regular season and were ranked #1 going into the playoffs. We swept the playoffs without losing even a single round,” Lee said.

The 2024-2025 school year is the third with esports as an official CHSAA-sanctioned activity.