CONTRIBUTED GRAPHIC MCC eSports Planning and Event Management students are hosting their first ever public Smash tournament on campus Sunday. Anyone is welcome to register.

Since it launched just a few short years ago, the Marshalltown Community College (MCC) eSports program has made headlines far and wide with success and national championships — including another recent one in Overwatch. Perhaps lost in the shuffle is the fact that the school also launched an eSports planning and event management program of study to help students who hope to find full-time employment in the massive and continually growing industry once they graduate.

As part of that education, the 12 students have been tasked with planning an event of their own, and they will be hosting their first Smash tournament with open registration this Sunday in the eSports lab on campus with check-in beginning at noon. Due to Marshalltown’s well-known love of pro wrestling, shown through both RuggedPro and The Flying Elbow, they’ve dubbed it “Marshallmania.”

Coach and instructor Nate Rodemeyer said the name sprung out of a conversation on branding as he felt the name and theme could be reused even if future tournaments revolve around a game other than Super Smash Bros., which pits various Nintendo characters against each other in a combat setting and first rose to prominence on the N64 when it was released in 1999.

“We had a whiteboard with a ton of different names on there, and we spent like two or three days kind of talking about what’s in a good name and what to do, and I think the name we ended up landing on was suggested by Max (Pietrzak, of Game Haven, who also coaches Smash and Madden at MCC) or Carter,” Rodemeyer said. “The whole Marshallmania thing landed because those two are arguably the two biggest wrestling fans in the whole MCC community.”

So far, they’ve already attracted 34 sign-ups with participants from as far away as the Dike-New Hartford area and Forest City. To register, visit https://www.start.gg/tournament/mcc-marshallmania/details or sign up the day of up until about an hour before the event begins.

And while it may be fun, games and Falcon punches for those who are competing Sunday, the tournament is also a valuable lesson for the students — many of whom have competed in eSports themselves — to learn the other side of the business.

“This is to give them the angle from the other end of how you put an event like this together. After you put in all that hard work to plan it, how do you get people to actually show up? So I think it’s been a valuable experience, hopefully for them, in that and then obviously running the day of,” Rodemeyer said. “I’m really proud of these guys because this is really something that they’ve done and that they’ve built, and I’ve just kind of been there to (supervise). It’s the first official tournament that we’ve ever run at MCC that’s outside of our actual teams that compete.”

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Contact Robert Maharry

at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or

rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.