DePaul Esports wins first tournament of 2022 – The DePaulia

DePaul’s Overwatch and Rocket League teams battled hard to win the Vincentian Cup last week. While the Blue Demons fell to St. John’s University in the Overwatch portion, DePaul swept the Rocket League

The Electronic Gaming Federation (EGF) hosted the tournament for its three Vincentian Universities: DePaul, St. John’s and Niagara University.

The two-day tournament started on Jan. 22 with an Overwatch matchup between DePaul and St. Johns. After five rounds, the Blue Demons fell 3-2 to the Red Storm.

“DePaul struggled to make late series adjustments to their team composition,” said Zachary “V1nson” Vinson, one of the sportscasters for the tournament. “They took far too long to swap in order to counter the Echo play of [St. John’s] and were unable to find a cohesive answer for the Winston-Zarya tank line.”

Despite losing, DePaul made up serious ground since they last played against St. Johns, which was a 3-0 sweep.

“You could definitely tell DePaul Overwatch has improved,” Maggie Vallone, team manager and vice president of the Overwatch board, said. “The team synergy and communication has gotten better.”

In the final tie-breaking match of the Overwatch series, DePaul made several large-margin rebounds in the king-of-the-hill style control map. In a control map, both teams aim to climb percentage points until one team reaches 100 percent.

DePaul faltered in the last map but remained persistent against St. John’s. The Blue Demons bounced back from large point deficits, taking control of the map when St. Johns was at 99 percent and they were at zero percent.

“In Overwatch, it’s quite difficult to turn around a team’s performance in a short amount of time, but that’s exactly what DePaul did,” said Billy “Chef Billy” Green, the other Overwatch sportscaster for the Vincentian Cup.

Despite bouts of strength to catch up to St. Johns, DePaul ultimately lost all three games in the last map.

The Rocket League portion of the invitational was on Jan. 23. DePaul’s Rocket League team beat Niagara 3-0 in the first series, advancing to the championship match against St. John’s. The Blue Demons again won the series 3-0, pulling ahead in the tournament and ultimately winning the Vincentian Cup.

Joey Puyear has been a member of the DePaul Rocket League junior varsity team for two years but has substituted for the varsity team a handful of times, including playing in the Vincentian Cup.

“To beat St. John’s, we really just focused on keeping our communication strong and our confidence level high,” Puyear said. “This win is a great start to our winter split. It gives all of our teams the confidence to keep improving and working hard in order to achieve bigger tournament wins.”

According to the EGF’s Twitch, DePaul was the Vincentian Cup champion by two points overall, as each team got one point per game won and two points for winning the series.

DePaul finished first with 12 points, St. John’s came in second with 10 points and Niagara, which only competed in the Rocket League portion, came in last place with zero points.