Lone Tree Esports Dominate in Mario Kart, Smite

By TJ Rhodes
Posted 3/29/23

The Lone Tree Esports team had their first meet of the season to face off against Woodbury Central Community School, dominating in a 123-93 Mario Kart 8 Deluxe showdown.  

Every Tuesday, …

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Lone Tree Esports Dominate in Mario Kart, Smite

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The Lone Tree Esports team had their first meet of the season to face off against Woodbury Central Community School, dominating in a 123-93 Mario Kart 8 Deluxe showdown. 

Every Tuesday, the varsity team will meet for Mario Kart races. After the first week, Lone Tree leads their 2S division in points. 

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is a racing game on the Nintendo Switch which came out in 2017. For this contest, the team broke off into three groups of two, facing off against Woodbury in sets.

Each set gets to participate in four races, each group selecting a track and the track selected randomly. Once a track is used, it cannot be used again in the competition. There are 48 tracks to choose from in the base game, meaning 12 will be used in each competition.

With four players facing off in each race, two per team, points are divvied up as follows: six points for first place, five for second, four for third and three for fourth. 

The goal for each team is to place first and second place in each race to ensure the most points at the end of the meet. Points are cumulative throughout the season, incentivizing each race, even if a team has the meet win already locked up.

Of the 12 races, Lone Tree got first place ten times and second place eight times, only finishing in fourth place once.

The team is coached by Jessica Howard, the business, high school computer teacher, and co-advisor of the national honor society.

For Mario Kart, nine of the participants in Esports play. Seniors; Jack Buser, Mitchell Koedam, Taj Williams, juniors; William Rockafellow, Weston Waldschmidt, Dom Graap, freshman; Cade Wiloz, Nic Bowman, and Vaughn Judge. 

 

Smite

This is the first year that Lone Tree has participated in Mario Kart. Last year, they were undefeated in Smite, a competitive online multiplayer game, until the tail end of the season when they lost their matches at State, ultimately placing fourth at state. 

This spring season, the varsity team will play Smite every Thursday. 

Their first matchup of the season was against Bettendorf High School. The first match lasted almost an hour, with Lone Tree dominating at first, then allowing Bettendorf to creep back into it. The format of a Smite matchup is best two out of three, but because of the length of the first round, Bettendorf forfeited the second match due to players needing to go home. This allowed Lone Tree to get an easy first win of the season. 

The Smite team at Lone Tree consists of ten players, Seniors; Koedam, Jadin Grieser, juniors; Rockafellow, Graap, Lucas Forbes, sophomore; Lukas Fuhmiester, freshmen; Tracy Musgrove, Carter Lisk, Judge and Bowman. 

After this win, they rank second place in their division.