Story by Angela F. Durkin
SPRING MILLS — Although special education teacher Jeremy Hubbard is at Hedgesville High School for the 2023-24 school year, he has reason to celebrate his previous work to secure an $18,000 grant to benefit the Spring Mills High School esports team.
Esports is where video games are played competitively for spectators, typically by professional gamers. For high school students, the ability to join an esports team is appealing as more and more colleges have begun offering scholarship opportunities.
Hubbard began coaching the SMHS esports team in April 2020. Since that time, he has worked to try to secure funding to help the team grow its equipment at the school.
SMHS received the $18,000 through an anonymous grant Tuesday, which Hubbard said would be used to help purchase needed equipment for the team. He has applied for this specific funding over the past two years, but this was the first time he was granted the award.
“The first thing is definitely going to be equipment,” Hubbard said. “Gaming PCs are not the cheapest thing in the world. Gaming PCs would be the thing to have the most, because that’s the most versatile. Almost anything you can play on a console you can play on a PC. We would need at least six or seven PCs, and they’re right there around $2,000.”
Having always wanted to be a coach, Hubbard recognized the opportunity esports offered him. He was born with cerebral palsy and was told from an early age that his dream to coach a baseball team would never materialize due to his handicap.
Esports made his dream a reality when he agreed to coach the team after learning more about it. Hubbard said esports is the most inclusive sport, and he was inspired to help SMHS have a sport that appeals to a broad range of students.
The students on the esports team have the option to break into smaller teams based on the games they like to play. Hubbard has had help, bringing in more game-specific coaches, which helps the team overall.
“Esports is definitely one of the hardest things to coach, because if you’re a football coach, you just need to know football. If you’re a baseball coach, you just need to know baseball,” Hubbard said. “Esports, you need to know the fighting games, first-person shooters, all different kinds of games, so its best have more than one person helping out.”
He was inspired to become the school’s esports coach after a student wanted to make the school’s gaming club more competitive. Jacob Dawson wasted no time with talking to Hubbard about ways to take the team to the next level.
“As soon as I became the person in charge of the program, literally, the next school day, one of the students who actually started the club, he found me,” Hubbard said.
The move to take the club from recreational to competitive proved to be beneficial for Dawson, who was awarded over 20 scholarships for college.
The club became part of the North American Scholastic E-Sports Foundation, and it began competing against both national and international schools. This has helped it become a team that is confident in playing against others in front of an audience.
The school had the first esports team in the state but not the last. Hubbard is now the esports coach at HHS but said he will continue to be involved with the SMHS team and other schools to help the sport grow.