Esports Club wins social media competition with help from Coyote Crazies
Starting in November, the USD Esports team entered a competition and then received help from the Coyote Crazies to eventually won the first prize of 15,000.
Last November they qualified and entered the Madden competition held by Learfield college. USD’s Jack Christianson did the gaming side and got USD qualified for the competition and Derek Bierschbach, the Esports President, performed the social media aspect of the competition.
“They put on a Madden football game competition and as part of that competition, everyone who made the top 125 got to participate in a Twitter competition. So that included all the power five schools, us smaller schools that qualified, and some programs like San Jose State,” Bierschbach said.
The competition consisted mainly of Christianson playing the game and a social media aspect that Bierschbach did on Twitter.
“Every retweet on every post we had was two points for us, every like and every comment was one point. Also every tweet we put out was five points. So in order to win the competition, we tweeted a lot,” Bierschbach said.
San Jose State was close to them in points throughout the competition and in the morning of the last day of the competition San Jose State was ahead and Bierschbach got up and started tweeting.
The Coyote Crazies social media chair Madison Sippel caught wind of the Esports competition and let everyone in the Coyote Crazies about the event.
“But we were excited to see everybody come around and just interact with Esports on social media and Twitter. It’s so hard to get that done nowadays. It just feels like everybody has their own thing. And it’s such a new thing once again, so it just felt good.” Marcus Destin, President of Coyote Crazies, said.
With the help of the Coyote Crazies, the Esports team shot up to the top with a real chance at first. The price breakdown is 15,000 dollars for first place, for second it was 7,500, for third it was 5,000, and 3,500 for fourth place. And then after that every other school in the top 10, received 1500.
“When the Coyote Crazies joined I really saw the impact that they could have, I was kind of hoping for top four, because I really wanted to shoot for fourth, just to get that increase. But yeah, once we got the lead, then it was like, wow, we can actually do this,” Bierschbach said.
It was announced on Jan. 11 that USD had one first place prize of $15,000. They won the competition by around 10,000 points.
With the money the Esports club plans to add on a new scholarship for Jacob Christianson who played the Madden game side of the competition. Currently the Esports club has 13 scholarships with students receiving $500 a semester.
Also the club plans to buy a new PC dedicated to streaming to help market the club more.
Currently the USD’s Esports team is working on growing it social media and plans to have twitch streams and is already participating in more competitions for this semester.
