Those Aren’t Spirit Fingers. THESE Are Spirit Fingers!

Title c/o Bring It On, 2000.

How cheerleading and gaming came together as the perfect match.

by Rachel Olsen-Cooper

Competitive cheerleading is a very lavish sport, complete with loud music, intricate routines, and families in matching outfits sporting “Cheer Mom/Dad/Bro/Sis.” Girls with their hair teased high with enough hair spray to make the girls of the 1980s jealous, glitter everywhere, and around every corner, someone is practicing a handspring or a lift. There’s definitely no shortage of spirit in this community.

But Rachel, I thought this site was about esports?

It is. Stick with me here.

Cheerleading competitions aren’t the optimal venue for a gathering of gamers, but for Freddie Halstead of Dallas, Texas, the master mind behind Battle City Esports, he saw it as a golden opportunity.

“I’ve been to several of these [cheerleading] events, and I was always struck by the number of bored brothers. It was a no brainer.”

Halstead is a former public-school teacher who got into youth gaming as a way to help keep kids in school. This is a strategy that a lot of schools are starting to take, even morphing video games like Minecraft into STEM programs.

Halstead took his background in education and passion for gaming and turned it into Techie Factory, a STEAM/Esports enrichment franchise based in Dallas. He also co-founded eTourney, a social/gaming app that was made exclusively for 8-13 year olds. Halstead says that the app is super safe and highly moderated for teens and tweens. Applications like Discord are a popular place for gamers to gather and talk about their games, but because it’s user generated, it may not be the safest place for kids to be. The eTourney app was created to give kids a safe place to socialize about gaming, and Battle City was created with the app in mind to allow Techie Factory teams a place to compete.

Battle City has appeared at three different cheerleading events: Cheer-A-Palooza Grand Nationals in Tulsa, Oklahoma, The Glow Tour in Frisco, Texas, and the Allstar World Championship in Orlando, Florida.

It was the Tulsa event that brought Halstead together with Contender Esports Gaming Center. “Many of the Contender locations are running summer camps using the Techie Factor curriculum,” says Halstead. “The folks at Contender Tulsa are one of them, and they said they had the equipment we could use for our Tulsa Event.”

From there, Contender worked with Halstead and Battle City to provide the equipment and staff for the Frisco and Orlando events, including multiple gaming PCs, Xbox, and Switch consoles to give a variety of ways for both kids and adults alike to cure their boredom.

This is how Battle City works: tournaments are run throughout the day in a variety of kid-friendly games, including Fortnite, Rocket League, Super Smash Brothers, and Roblox. The ages range anywhere from 9 and under, under 14, and all ages, depending on the game involved. A small fee is required to enter, and prizes range from Amazon gifts, candy, and merchandise like t-shirts. Not ready to flex the competitive muscles? There is also a pay-to-play option, where patrons could pay a fee to play anywhere from one hour to spending the full day.

Many of the parents at the Orlando event were incredibly grateful that they had a place that their non-cheerleader children could go to that they could be entertained, and the parents knew they were safe. Multiple parents stopped at the front table on the way out for the day, not only to express how they hoped events like these would continue at other competitions, but to state how they heard that colleges and universities were starting to give scholarships into their esports programs, and they hoped that they could learn more about the industry so they could get their children involved.

With esports and gaming on the rise at the educational level, the future is bright for Battle City. Halstead hopes that he’ll be running anywhere from 40-80 events throughout the country. He also hopes that more professional organizations will start to acknowledge that youth gaming is on the rise. “If professional esports is going to “work”, they must be more willing to involve kids.” Competitive cheerleading and competitive video games are probably two of the most unlikely things anyone could put together. Cheerleading is a very team-based sport. These athletes need to depend on their teammates around them to make sure that they’re in-sync with each other for their routines, that those who are the base are strong enough not to drop the ones who are being lifted or tossed in the air, and that they don’t run into each other during a tumbling pass. There’s a level of trust that they must have for themselves and each other.

Competitive video games can also be team based. These athletes must depend on their teammates to make the right call outs if someone is around the corner, camping with a shotgun, ready to take out the unsuspecting player running towards them, to strategize their movements across maps, and help revive them if their player is down. There’s a level of trust they must have for themselves and each other.

Maybe the two work together after all. To learn more about Battle City Gaming, please visit http://battlecity.gg