The UNT League of Legends (LoL) team’s first excursion to DreamHack Austin, held June 1 - 3, was an overarching success. The event enabled the team to have a few days of intensive practice and work that led up to their feature matches on the last day of DreamHack. AVGL (American Video Game League) organized a grudge match league for local universities in Texas to compete amongst themselves on the Main Stage. The games had about 2,000 average viewers on Twitch.

UNT’s first match against UTA was a gradual decisive win. Notably, Jungler Vi “L for Learn” Tran’s Rek’Sai rotations would lead to the team decisively winning all three of their lanes. The team then methodically took smart team fight after smart team fight and slowly pushed into UTA’s base for the game one win.

Game two against UTA presented a greater challenge to the team. With a bizarre drafting play from UTA,  a mid Master Yi caught our draft off guard pitting Jordan “Tank top Chad” Eckerd’s Victor in an unfavorable match up. While he was able to get kills when L for Learn rotated, the edge that UTA got from this propelled them into the late game and enabled them to pull off a few very crippling rat plays causing the leading UNT team to direct their attention and focus to the Yi. After several countered Rat plays and a mountain drake pick up, UNT was able to pull off a nail-biting base race and finish 2-0 against UTA.

After the win, UNT advanced to play UTSA, the winner of the previous Grudge Match series, and competed in a best of one game. This was by far the hardest game the UNT students experienced over the three days they were at Dreamhack. UTSA drafted out most of Lester “Lewynhart” Nguyen’s ADC heroes, forcing him to pick up a Vayne, a very late game-orientated champion. UTSA got an early game lead by picking off a 4-champ bubble leading to a first blood. UNT lost top and mid to UTSA’s early game pressure. For about 20 minutes of the game, UNT was actively losing, but thanks to some very defensive plays from Eric “Etherno” Nguyen’s Gangplank and Joseph “GetFizzical” Fergen, the team was eventually able to figure out how to curb the bleeding and slow the game down. Once UNT advanced to the late game, Lewynhart was able to decisively deliver killing blows against the enemy team and take away the 35-minute advantage that UTSA had and led to UNT winning the day.

All in all, the UNT team displayed an extraordinary comradery and cohesiveness for being such a new team. DreamHack enabled the team to focus hard on their playstyle for a few days and define their primary strengths. UNT is excited to see what the team accomplishes when the 18-19 season for LoL kicks off.

For more information on the esports program, contact Dylan Wray, Recreation Program Specialist - Esports Coordinator, at Dylan.wray@UNT.edu or 940.453.5227, or visit https://recsports.unt.edu/programs/esports.

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Contact: Ray Willhoft, 940-565-2464, raymond.willhoft@unt.edu