The Spring season for the Washington Scholastic School ESports Association will wrap up soon, and overall, all of the Lake Stevens High School eSports teams are in good shape to make it to the state playoffs for this year.

“Both the Rocket League and Valorant teams have already secured a playoff berth for the WSSEA Spring 2025 Esports State Championship. But, the Smash team won’t end the regular season undefeated, but I am fairly confident they will perform well enough to secure a playoff berth as well,” Video Game Club advisor and eSports coach Trevor Wood said.

Last spring, only LSHS’s Super Smash Bros. Ultimate team made it to the state championships, where they lost in the sixteenth round.

However, this year, the teams have high hopes for making it all the way.

“All three teams are doing very well. Rocket League is one week away from finishing the regular season with an undefeated record, and our Valorant team is three weeks away from the same thing,” Wood said.

Since the 2019-2020 school year, the eSports team has steadily grown in the number of players participating. The majority of the games on the list for competition each year is averaging about 20 students playing for the team.

“I am actually very pleased with the size of our eSports program as it is. We already have a pretty positive buzz around campus, and word of mouth spreads pretty fast,” Wood said.

Aside from the competitive aspect, these eSports activities can have both a positive and negative impact on the students who participate in them.

A study in the National Library of Medicine said that eSports players have expressed both positive and negative consequences to their daily lives while participating.

The study stated that high school eSports players spend an average of 18 hours more playing video games than high school gamers who don’t participate in eSports, which can lead to less time being spent on schoolwork, hurting their learning.

Senior and Video Game Club treasurer Jasmine Dulay stated that participating in eSports for a high school team is a chance to play video games in a more competitive and social way, because these teams face other high schools across the state.

The study also backs this up, by saying, “[eSports] players report positive consequences on their physical and mental health, on their social relationships, on their general motivation and on their concentration.”

While students balance their competitions with their academics, they have to prepare themselves for the upcoming WSSEA State competition in the Lynnwood Event Center on May 18, as the final season of the eSports year comes to a close.