As many of the Eagles on Ashland’s campus look forward to the start of the Spring 2023 Semester, there is one program that looks forward to the competition to come. The Ashland University Fortnite and CS:GO, eSports teams, look forward to the new competition this coming season after a promising fall semester.

The Ashland University CS:GO team, also known as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, looks to try and redeem themselves after falling short in a 2-0 loss against Michigan Tech in the fall 2022 playoffs. 

The CS:GO team has seen a great amount of success over the past few seasons, most notably being the 2nd ranked team at the end of the regular season in collegiate play less than two years ago. They hope to continue the previous success in this new season, as they continue to compete in the NACE Starleague. 

The CS:GO team looks to compete in a new league this year, but the team is still awaiting confirmation that they will be competing in the Faceit league. For the NACE League this season the team competes every Friday as of right now. With the first league match coming up shortly the team has already begun practicing for the season on January 10th. 

As AU has been a dominant force in CS:GO, Senior In Game Leader and Main Rifler Seth Ho, has high hopes for this season.

“We are definitely getting more out of server work done, like learning utility in the game and learning more stuff to elevate our game to dominate the top schools,” said Ho.

Alongside the CS:GO team, the Ashland University Fortnite team has begun practicing for this new season of competitive play. 

As one of the other premiere teams in the Esports program at AU, the Fortnite team also looks to build on previous successes this coming season. 

Last season, the Fornite team traveled to Akron University to compete in their first LAN tournament, and the young team saw a decent amount of success. Captain, Brendan Hickey, placed 8th at the competition, and Senior, River Wheeler, came in 15th place. 

“At Akron, there were multiple different Zero Build Tournaments,” said Hickey. “And the team was able to see great success with being able to take the top 4 and 5 spots in the tournaments.”

Though there has been success with the Fortnite team in the previous season the team is still battling through the transfers and departure of the other top players on the team. Lucas Radcliffe, and Mikah Juma, made up two-thirds of a very successful trio.  

The trio consisted of Brendan Hickey, Mikah Juma, and Lucas Radcliffe, who saw success in competition with multiple different top-ten rankings. 

Despite the departure, Brendan Hickey has continued to compete at a high level and has high hopes to continue to lead this young Fortnite team into the next season. 

The season opener for the Ashland University Fortnite team is slated for January 26th, 2023.