Meet the Competitive Gamers of East New York

It’s a balmy Saturday morning in mid-June, and at Spring Creek Education Campus in East New York a group of high schoolers are gathering for a first-of-its kind sporting match in the neighborhood. The home team players, from the Academy for Young Writers High School, mill around and talk strategy, while their coach hovers nearby. The visiting team, from Roosevelt High School in Yonkers, has just arrived, and they seem jittery; one worries aloud that they might “get their asses kicked.” Soon it’s time to begin play, and the two teams take to their field: a long row of black laptops equipped with headphones and mice and hooked up to a massive projection screen, where, for the next hour, the AFYW Lunar Ravens and the Roosevelt Sharks will battle it out in a friendly match of League of Legends, a multi-player battle-arena video game in which players fight their way across treacherous terrain with the goal of destroying their opponent’s “nexus” (LoL speak for “fort”)… Welcome to high-school sports in the twenty-first century. — Alexandria Neason