Esports Weekly Recap: Week of November 17

(Howell, MI)-- Here is the recap for Cleary Esports for action during the week of November 10:

On Wednesday: Call of Duty was supposed to have their playoff semifinals match against Southeastern Illinois College- but one of Cleary's players was locked out of their Microsoft account when the match time was supposed to be, and the other team stubbornly refused to cooperate to choose a new match time. An annoying blunder and awful timing, but the Cougars were forced to forfeit the match and end our semester. Despite a 0-2 start Cleary found their way into the 2 seed spot in the playoffs, and would have definitely been favored to win our match if we had gotten to play it.

On Friday: Valorant and Rocket League took part in the River City Invitational at Comic Con in Grand Rapids, where they got some extremely valuable reps against some of the best teams in the state. Valorant made it through the group stage of the tournament with a record of 2-1 (one of the wins coming from a bye due to how the tournament was formatted), beating GVSU B 13-8 and falling to GVSU A 3-13. On record, Cleary was the #4 seed in the playoff bracket, but fell in the first round to GVSU B with an 0-2 (0-13, 2-13) map score. 

Rocket League was straight into a double elimination bracket for the tournament, where they got a brutal first matchup against #2 seeded Davenport, a trial by fire for the two freshmen on the team that had yet to play an official college match, let alone doing so on stage. Still, they showed quite a bit of fight, taking a map off of Davenport for a map score of 1-3. Game 4 was a one point game that came down to the final seconds, very real world in which CU forced a game 5. After immediately falling to lowers, Cleary matched up against Baker College, who they made quick business of, winning 3-0. The next match was played against Spring Arbor, who handed took down the Cougars 2-3 in the series. Out of the five maps, four went to overtime.