Former Bobcat Esports President, Kristofer Meyeres, is leaving the university with a successful organization and a springboard for esports expansion for years to come.
Meyeres was responsible for founding Bobcat Esports in 2018 and establishing its position at the university. He has overseen its substantial expansion and prevalence on campus to what it is today.
During this time, Bobcat Esports has taken many initiatives to garner interest in the online esports scene, as they are continuing to scrimmage, stream, and actively solicit online events via Discord.
In the past, Bobcat Esports hosted student vs. faculty events on League of Legends that were streamed on Twitch, where Meyeres operated the stream. Meyeres noted that the event, like all Bobcat Esports events, was a team effort, with Ivy O’Shaugnessy and Jeff Kuhn coordinating the event with staff, the League of Legends team coaches assisting Meyeres in the stream, and Kevin King and Teri Heartland worked to secure faculty and player interest. Many of the Bobcat Esports sponsored events follow a format where many members are contributing to the event as a whole.
The student involvement fair has been a large medium for Bobcat Esports to expand in the past. Although it may not happen this year, the group currently stands around 100, and the growth can partially be attributed to student interest that has been tapped into by the student involvement fair every fall.
Bobcat Esports has also reached out to venues outside of the campus, such as the Overwatch tournament in Columbus, various Super Smash Bros. tournaments, Rocket League events, and a myriad of other events in which the clubs travel to.
Regarding the new esport facility located at the bottom of Scripps Hall, Meyeres believes that its addition to the university will not only be a selling point to many coming to OU, but also will garner attention from outside schools to come to visit the campus and compete. Its inclusion will also serve the members of Bobcat Esports, and even those not affiliated with the organization, both socially and for practice.
It is of paramount importance for Bobcat Esports to preserve the individual clubs’ identities and cultures. To do so, each group has its own ecosystem and is independent of Bobcat Esports, as they are in charge of the events they partake in, meeting dates and other club-specific interests. For Meyeres, a large part of his presidency was acknowledging the differences of each club at OU and to keep in mind that no gaming community at the university was the same, as each club has their own history. The officers of Bobcat Esports keep close ties with the clubs and their presidents, constantly tweaking and improving relationships between the organizations.
Meyeres graduated from the University in the Spring of 2020 with a BBA in Finance, Management Information systems, and Quantitative Business Analytics.
The presidency has since been handed off to Micah Tóbon as of January 2020, who, prior to gaining the position, was the president of the League of Legends club. Katie Schmidt will serve as the Vice President and Pat Daley will be the program director for this coming year.
The McClure School of Emerging Communication Technologies strives to offer the best academic programs in the IT (Information Technology) , the game development and the Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality (VR/AR) industries. Our programs and certificates cover numerous aspects of the rapidly changing industries of information networking, information security, data privacy, game development , digital animation and the academic side of esports .