Apr 9, 2021 | SPORTS | By Ian Chalmers | Illustration by Xixi Qin
The Colorado College Rocket League Team, so far undefeated, is headed to the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference finals. Will the Tigers come out on top and take home the bacon at the SCAC championship as they did back in 2019? The Catalyst spoke with Case Osborn ’21, the captain of the Tigers Rocket League Team, to get insight into how the team is doing.
Asked how the team has been doing this season, Osborn said, “Yeah, we went undefeated in our regular season, SCAC, and are going to grand finals now. For our own standards, we are kind of underperforming; we have had a hard time clicking as a team, the three of us, just in terms of our gameplay, it’s been hard getting on the same page and stuff.”
Osborn elaborated on the Collegiate Rocket League (CRL) qualifiers, the team’s next target.
“It’s sponsored by Psyonix, the game developer, and everything is organized by a $75,000 prize pool for scholarships. The best teams that go to finals for CRL are basically pro-level players, so it’s pretty hard to do well in it, but the open qualifiers have hundreds of teams trying to compete for a spot to play in the regular season,” Osborn said. “We made the top 32 teams in the tournament out of 175, or more than that maybe. So we did pretty good, but the goal is to actually get into CRL.”
Colorado College’s Rocket League team has seen huge success for a team that was created only three years ago. Osborn started the Rocket League Team during his sophomore year, back in the fall of 2018.
He is the only player that has been there since the beginning, as the current team consists of him and two sophomores. Osborn will be graduating this year, leaving the team in the hands of two first-years and a sophomore.
“Honestly, they’re all better than me at the game, which is pretty awesome since [during] my freshman, sophomore, and even junior year, I was the best player on the team, and we were still able to do well at SCAC,” Osborn said. “There were a couple of teams that managed to take a game or two off of us in the series as we weren’t playing as well as we wanted to be.”
The grand finals this weekend should be an exciting match between the Tigers and Concordia.
“I’m honestly excited to graduate and watch the team get better because these two freshmen are really good,” Osborn said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they managed to qualify for CRL League Play at some point before they graduate in the next few years, which would be pretty freaking awesome.”
Most teams that play in the CRL come from larger schools like Louisiana State University, so qualification by a small school like CC would be a serious accomplishment. CRL games also get a large number of views since they are streamed on the official Rocket League channel on Twitch (this channel frequently receives about 100,000 concurrent views for the CRL finals).
The tigers will play at SCAC against Concordia this Saturday, April 10 at 5 p.m. MST against Concordia. You can tune in here.