Three squads from the University of Southern Maine’s ESports club program won their first-round Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) playoff matches and will compete in semifinal and quarterfinal matches this week.
- USM’s Street Fighter 6 team will play a quarterfinals match on Tuesday, Dec. 5 at 8pm.
- USM’s Madden 23 (football) team will play a quarterfinals match on Thursday, Dec. 7 at 8pm.
- USM’s League of Legends team will compete in semifinals play on Friday, Dec. 8 at 8pm.
The ECAC ESports conference includes teams from more than 160 schools and is highly competitive, so this level of success represents a tremendous achievement, USM ESports Club Chairman Michael Brown said.
Last semester, the USM club had two teams that went into the playoffs, Brown said. This semester, seven squads qualified for the first round of playoff action.
The USM ESports club is small but growing, Brown said. The ECAC doesn’t draw lines between Divisions I, II and III; instead, the teams compete against each other based on rankings – that is, how well they do in the games themselves.
“Despite our size, we’ve had matches against schools that are much larger – Penn State and others – and we’ve beaten them,” Brown said. “This is not going unnoticed. Despite us being kind of small, we’re having a huge impact here at USM and in the collegiate ESports scene.”
USM’s Esports teams have also attracted a lot of online viewers when they play. The games are livestreamed and they’re available on the Huskies ESports Twitch stream, which you can find here.