After a few weeks of open access, the Esports Arena is restoring the reservation system to control access.

“With the … excitement surrounding the facility being reopened for the school year, as well as me working through the motions of being a new staff member, we did away with [reservations] for the first couple of weeks,” said Xavier Patterson, Esport coach and manager of the school’s Esports arenas. “We are looking to reinstate the reservation system as soon as possible just to keep things a lot more organized and uniform.” 

In the past, students had to register online for designated time slots, which would limit how long one student could use a computer or console. The open access system allowed the arenas to get busy with students interested in playing – whether or not they are part of the school’s Esports team.

Currently, hours are open for every student to come as they please. It can get crowded.

“I’m here quite often, and I’ve seen the numbers,” said Will Maldia, a sophomore in Mechanical Engineering Technology. “It tends to be the busiest around 2 p.m, and during that time we have to start turning people away because we’re out of computers.” 

Patterson acknowledges the demand. 

“It gets busy … to the point where sometimes we’ll even have to overflow our varsity stuff a bit,” he said. “We’ll have so many varsity athletes in our space who want to practice … that they’ll have to play on our lower-end setups because all our varsity systems are taken up.”

The solution is to close the Hammond arena – which is the most used – at 5 p.m.

“This ensures we have the space cleared for warmups, for practice times and for match days,” said Patterson. “We want to ensure that the people on our varsity teams are getting the time and the space to succeed … we also still want to welcome our general gaming community here on campus, and we want to make sure we do right by them.”