When people walk into room 706, students can be heard cheering and their controllers clicking and clacking while they play Rocket League, Halo, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and many more.

It’s Thursday after school and Frank Ceja, the information technology teacher at La Quinta High School, is hosting the Esports Club. 

Esports is a club where students can play video games. But beyond playing video games, it also creates a community within the school and teaches students skills, such as communicating with other students and learning how to be a team. 

Ceja said that he thinks hosting this club is the “best thing to ever happen.” He thinks that people will finally see how important gaming is because he’s a gamer and has been gaming his whole life. 

People see in the media that there are other people who are gaming and are making millions of dollars like Ninja, Markiplier, DanTDM, PewDiePie, and Jacksepticeye, and many more.

Ceja also set up this club because he thought that if he expanded the club and got to play in real tournaments, the club might be able to raise a lot of money through fundraisers at school.

He enjoys playing video games very much, but the one that impacted him the most was “Halo.” It was the first game that he could play with other people worldwide without having them go over to his house.

Ceja has been teaching technology for three years and plans on teaching for more years and also plans on hosting the club for as long as he is at La Quinta High.

There will be many different teams for the different games they’ll be playing. For example, one team will be the Rocket League team and ten people will be on that team and another team will be the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate team with another ten people, and all other games will be hosted by other teams with a lot of people.

At practice, they play certain games that Ceja wants students to play. These practices often happen Thursday in his classroom. 

For example, at one practice, students will only play Valorant or Halo. Students will bring their own consoles like their PS4, Xbox, or Nintendo Switch. They would also even bring their own controllers. Ceja said that his favorite console is Xbox because “Halo was exclusive to Xbox,” and before that, he had Nintendo and Atari systems, but Halo was a big game-changer for him.

What people mostly enjoy about participating in the Esports club is that they get to play video games with their friends.

The “best thing about the club” is that Ceja will host tournaments on certain games. That’s another way on how he plans on expanding the club.

Katie Armenteros ‘22,  who is the president of the club, decided to join because she “really loves playing video games” and “Overwatch” was the one that mostly “made a huge impact” for her. She’s been in the club since her sophomore year.

Her favorite part about it is that she gets to meet new people who share the same interests. Her favorite game is currently “Risk of Rain 2.” She also thinks that it’s important for the school to have this club because since games are really popular, it “helps a lot of people connect with each other.”