Kansas City Chief Mecole Hardman Just Wants ‘To Get Good’ At Rocket League

It all started with a tweet back in September.

Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver Mecole Hardman, sent this quick one-liner out to the masses:

“Anybody play Rocket League?” he asked in a tweet that now has nearly 6,000 likes.

It turns out, quite a few people do, including fellow NFL athletes George Kittle, Devonta Smith, and Cam Jordan. All four NFL players have partnered up with Rocket League developer Psyonix for this year’s NFL/Rocket League crossover, which includes NFL content in the popular cars-meet-soccer video game, and the video game in these stars’ social media feeds and Twitch streams.

Part of this, for 23-year-old Hardman, is just his competitive nature. “I wanna get good,” he tells me, which—alongside having fun—is frankly one of the most noble ambitions any gamer (or athlete) can aspire to. This partnership between the NFL players and Rocket League should give Hardman plenty of chances to up his game.

Of course, the competition is fierce. 49er’s tight end George Kittle has been playing Rocket League since college, and has played and streamed alongside many of the game’s biggest influencers. Hardman, on the other hand, only got into Rocket League this year—and he got here by way of Warzone.

“I wanted to play Warzone,” Hardman says—and, naturally, get good at the battle royale so that he could hold his own with friends and foes alike.

So he did the only sensible thing any contender could do—and got a gaming PC. He’d been playing games on consoles for years but this was his first foray into the world of PC gaming. To be really competitive in the Call Of Duty battle royale, he knew he’d need to upgrade to PC. Some of his squad mates were already getting dozens of kills per match. It was time to evolve.

Rocket League was next up on Hardman’s list of gaming conquests. He hadn’t heard about the game until he began his PC gaming adventure, but it seemed like a good fit. Futbol rather than American football, sure, and cars instead of people, but still a competitive multiplayer experience that would test his gaming mettle and give him something to do when he wasn’t on the field.

Competitiveness and “getting good” are the driving forces behind Hardman’s attitude on and off the field, in sports and video games. But he acknowledges he has a lot of work to put in before he can compete with guys like Kittle in Rocket League. It turns out that knocking a ball around a field with cars in a video game is actually quite different from playing football.

Rocket League is fun for casual and competitive gamers alike but it has a definite learning curve. The kind of skills you need to get a 49-yard touchdown against the Ravens won’t always translate to mouse-and-keyboard. Hardman’s ethos, on the other hand—a drive to win and excel at everything he sets his mind to—is another matter entirely—and a key component to any success story.

Harmdan also signed on recently with another pro team: the Kansas City Pioneers, a professional eSports team. He made the move along with fellow Kansas City Chiefs defensive back Armani Watts, further bridging the gap between traditional sports and its digital counterpart in gaming. Hardman says he’s excited about the positivity and community he’s found with the Pioneers. It’s a natural fit for someone who’s made gaming a lifelong hobby.

Gaming has been a part of Mecole Hardman’s life for about as long as sports, with titles like Call Of Duty: Black Ops 1 getting him hooked on competitive shooters, and sports games like Madden and MLB: The Show, as well as single-player adventures like Assassins Creed all making up bits and pieces of his gaming DNA. (For context, Black Ops 1 came out in November of 2010, several months after Hardman’s 12th birthday).

In some ways, Hardman sees his time playing Rocket League and with the Pioneers as a “safe haven” from the more physically punishing world of the NFL. Games may be “just another hobby,” but it’s one that provides him a certain level of escape, without foregoing the fun of healthy competition. Being part of the Pioneers is an exciting new way to flex his competitive muscle and have some fun.

The partnership between these NFL players and Psyonix is the brainchild of Rebel Ventures, a sports digital strategy firm that works with athletes and sports brands to take advantage of modern tech and social media.

“We worked closely with Psyonix to select NFL players that have an affinity for Rocket League, a desire to play the game often and get better, and an insatiable appetite to compete and share some of those moments,” says Rebel Ventures CEO Craig Howe.  “Mecole is a great example. He loves the game, and has been sharing content organically to his channels. Our goal from day one has been for this campaign to generate genuine content and storytelling, and it’s rewarding to see it working.”

NFL and Rocket League fans have some friendly competition to look forward to in the very near future. Mecole Hardman, Cam Jordan, George Kittle, and Mark Ingram will be squaring off alongside Rocket League infuencers, pros and gamers over Thanksgiving week.

They’ll be playing a special limited-time mode called Gridiron Games that transforms the Rocket League soccer ball into an American football and changes up the rules and scoring to hew a little closer to that sport. It’s all part of the game’s current NFL-themed season.

For Hardman, this is just the beginning.

Like any great story of competition and rivalry, of upstart newcomers and seasoned veterans, the story of Mecole Hardman’s quest to “git gud” at Rocket League, and maybe even topple the defending champion someday, has just begun.

Maybe some helpful Rocket Leaguers out there can help him on his journey. After all, he’s the one asking on Twitter if anybody plays Rocket League. The very least his fellow gamers can do is lend a helping hand.

How long until he thinks he’ll have the skills to take on Kittle and other top Rocket League players?

“I don’t know, man,” he says with a laugh. “We’ll see.”

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