League of Legends is always the focus in esports. This game has existed for nine years, and in 2018, SNHU officially incorporated a collegiate esports team. League of Legends, however, was considered the most.
Typically, there are five roles in League of Legends: the top-lane, mid-lane, support, carry and jungler. Sultan Akhter, the captain of the team and ex-platinum-four and a current gold-three player with four-year league experience, is in charge of top lane. His duty is to focus damage on himself for protecting teammates so his champion is always tank characters.
Mike Cao, a previous and current diamond-two player with seven-years experience, is in charge of mid-lane. His job is to maintain team formation. His main champion is usually a mage character. One of the advantages of mage character is its DPS (damage per second) is relatively higher than characters of other classes so it is able to crush opponent formation in the early game.
John Stillman, an ex-diamond-four player with ten-years experience, supports, and Connor Lefevra, ex-master and a current diamond-one player with ten-years league experience, is a carry of the team. They usually act together at the bot-lane. Lefevra focuses on eliminating opponents and Stillman focuses on recovering Lefevra’s skill and life point.
Xincheng Dong, an ex-platinum-four and current diamond-four player, is in charge of jungling. As a jungler, he needs to collect resources such as gold for the team so the entire team can be powered up by using it. Then the team would have more advantage than the opponent. His job is to eliminate the creatures in the jungle. Besides that, he is not easy to be noticed in the entire game since the jungle area is usually invisible and where is the space he is responsible for. Therefore, his other job is to sneak attack opponent. Dan Viens, an ex-platinum-five and current gold-one player with six-years experience, is the alternate member. He is able to play any role just in case any main member cannot participate in a game. However, the team’s strategy is that he would be the jungler if they decided to play slow-pace bot-lane and Dong for a more fast pace strategy.
The SNHU League team won its first game in the ninth season on February 1st. The next game will be on either this Friday (Feb.15) or Sunday (Feb.17). According to the game record of the pre-season, the team kept winning until they lost advantage at the round of top 32 in the East coast.
Akhter said the biggest challenge of the team was communication, mentality and especially individual ability. He supplemented the reason why they lost at the top 32 round was that the entire opposing team was challenging. The difference in skill level between the teams was evident. On the other hand, Akhter mentioned SNHU had played together for a year so they had the good chemistry as an advantage this season.
“This advantage could also be the disadvantage,” said Akhter. Akhter knows his teammates including himself may not be willing to tell what the mistakes the other teammates made since that would potentially hurt them.
Surely, Akhter still believed the team could surpass the game record of the pre-season. His trust had the evidence to support a positive argument on the team’s improvement on communication, mentality and individual ability as a team.
