An unknown, but successful club at Mansfield High is the League of Legends club. League of Legends is an online multiplayer strategic battle game that is taking teenagers everywhere by a storm. Five players work together to destroy an enemy base and while this may seem like an easy task, when put into action senior and co-captain Anthony White assures that it gets pretty competitive.

“Last year we joined a tournament called HSL (High School Star League) and the tournament hosts other games, but League of Legends is the most popular game,” White said. “So there was this article about it and I saw it so I signed up with my teammates at the time- Alex Crutchfield, Charles Wang, Henry Tran, and Quinton Cosey- and we went into the tournament representing Mansfield High School.”

The matches were usually scheduled on the weekends in order to insure availability of the players and for a while the team of five won every game they played.

“Yeah, we pretty much went undefeated, we beat around 12-14 schools and we ended up being in the top 16.” White said. “Why we ended up 9th was a result of how the matches were set up.”

When the judges seeded the top 16 bracket they put teams that had shown their proficiency against each other while teams that had suffered a few losses were put against each other.

“There are ranks in League of Legends for each individual player and at the time the highest rank was called a Challenger and really that’s only 0.02% players in each country and it just so happened that the team we went against had five players that were challengers and so we got taken out,” White said.

From these five players stemmed a club at Mansfield High.

“Expectations [for the club] were for a place where students could congregate and play the game together in the same room instead of virtually,” club sponsor Mr. Kadekawa said. “I wanted it to be a place where players could socialize in person rather than through chat or voice chat programs like Skype.”

Although the club has doubled, limitations on the computers stunts the growth of it as well as a lack of sponsors. This club is currently the only club of its kind in the district but it has hopes for other high schools to form their own.

“There is the problem of MISD technology recognizing it as a legitimate club and allowing network access,” said Mr. Kadekawa. “We are looking for more sponsors but teachers that know and play the game are hard to find.”

Later on in the year Mansfield High will host a tournament for the League of Legends club for the regional area. If you are interested in joining, the League of Legends club meets every Friday in F1 from 3:00 to 4:45