T-R PHOTO BY ROBERT MAHARRY — The MCC esports program recently added two more National Junior College Athletic Association Esports (NJCAAE) championships to its repertoire, one in the Overwatch 2 Contender Series and one in the Mario Kart 4v4 Open Series. Pictured in the top row, from left to right: Mauricio Nunez (MHS), John “Whit” Gerard (BGM), Brannen Kent (Urbandale), Dallas Heaberlin (Murray). Bottom row, from left to right: Gabby Eirikson (West Marshall), Amber Lawthers (MHS), Jade Mauseth (East Marshall), Ryne Sinn (East Marshall). Sinn competed on the Overwatch team, while the others were team members or alternates for Mario Kart.

After Marshalltown Community College’s own Amber Lawthers came out of nowhere to win a national championship in Mario Kart during the esports program’s first competitive season last year, coaches Nate Rodemeyer and Andrew Goforth didn’t want it to simply be a feel good flash in the pan story. Their goal was to create a perennial powerhouse, and if recent results are any indication, they seem to be succeeding.

“I think what Andrew and I really wanted to do was just to build on what we’d done in year one. Obviously, winning a national championship. It was obviously a big, unexpected thing for us. Like you said, it put us on the map,” Rodemeyer said. “We wanted to craft a very competitive program. We both valued the integrity of practices and things like you would in a traditional sports program, and so we knew going from year one to year two that we wanted to continue to build on that success and see if we could capitalize on anything else after that.”

Two MCC teams — one Mario Kart 4v4 squad and another in Overwatch 2 — recently won NJCAAE championships for the fall semester, and there were several other runners-up and top 10 finishes to add to the school’s ever-increasing list of accolades.

Goforth credited the title coaches and second year students who have stayed with the program and provided steady leadership even as players come and go at the junior college level.

“Our second year students in general really stepped up this time around, and they kind of carried the torch over. They carried the culture over from the first year to the second, and without them, we would not have seen the success that we did,” he said.

While most people know Mario Kart — from its Nintendo 64 and Switch iterations — is as an individual game, team member Brannen Kent explained that the 4v4 requires them to work together and communicate on which shortcuts to take, which items they had and more.

Lawthers and fellow Marshalltown native Mauricio Nunez were both members of the team as well, and the team members agreed that her success last year inspired them to push forward and believe in themselves.

West Marshall alum Gabby Eirikson that she learned valuable lessons about the importance of communication.

“With our setup, we were sitting right next to each other, so you could easily look at another screen or you can just easily talk to somebody and not have to try and just figure things out on your own. It’s really nice being able to work with other people,” she said.

Ryne Sinn, a member of the Overwatch team, said his squad received a dose of humility earlier in the season as they went undefeated in the preseason and knew they had something special brewing. In the first match of the regular season, however, they lost to the team they’d later face in the national championship.

“That was just a really humbling moment where, like, we do lose. We aren’t the best team in our league. We need to dial in and start practicing, and then, from there, it felt like we were actually getting better because before we weren’t practicing that hard when we thought we were untouchable,” he said. “We were humbled, and then we definitely started putting the work in.”

Although securing a national championship is an incredible feeling, it also came at a cost as Nunez joked that none of his friends will play Mario Kart against him for fun anymore. The coaches are nonetheless excited to build a tradition of esports success at MCC, recruiting new players both from the area and from across the state and the country — always passing the torch to the next set of players and building each other up in the process.

“It’s really about never being complacent. The second we get complacent, the second that another school is gonna come in and do better than we are,” Goforth said. “I feel like it’s our job to get really good people and then enable them to be better and be more successful than they were coming out of high school.”

——

Contact Robert Maharry at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.