Daniel Rios is an ASU Cronkite School of Journalism student assigned to cover Phoenix Country Day for AZPreps365.com

Teaching and coaching can be different but at their core it’s the same. One Phoenix Country Day teacher teaches chemistry by day and coaches esports at night. 

Esports has been on the rise the past couple of years. The most recent League of Legends Worlds championship drew in 6.4 million viewers at its peak. With its growth, more and more avenues are opening up. For Students here in Arizona, the AIA is making those avenues possible.

The AIA, with the help of third party companies, set up leagues for three games that students in Arizona can compete in, League of Legends, Rocket League and Super Smash Bros. Students can compete in a preseason, regular season and playoff format type league and each game has one match per week.

Chase McVey is the head of the esports program at PCD. He makes sure that kids can compete in these leagues, and have fun doing it. McVey took an interest in gaming early on. 

“My earliest memory of gaming would be playing Doom, original Doom with my dad,” McVey said. “He would play on his computer which was in the basement of our house at the time, and I would play on my moms laptop. I was 4 years old.” 

Growing up along with video games, McVey, had a passion for science as well. He originally majored in biology at Northern Arizona University, but it didn’t really live up to his expectations. 

“I was taking like ecology and genetics, and it wasn’t the nitty gritty I was looking for, like molecular biology,” McVey said. “I switched to biochemistry. I went all the way through biochemistry, and my plan was I’m going to be a career scientist.” 

When he was a kid, McVey wanted to help cure cancer. After going through school and going into graduate school, he started working in a lab. His childhood dream came true, finally being able to work in a lab. His childhood expectation didn’t come to fruition. 

“The lab that I was in was very much producing career scientists. I saw these people leaving and saw their jobs afterwards, and it was just kinda more grad school,” McVey said. “So I felt like I don't want to continue to do all of this work for relatively little payoff, like in terms of enjoyment.”

He attended graduate school at Ohio State. While there he was a teacher's assistant. When lab work became stale for him he really started to look towards teaching for enjoyment. He started to teach at Ohio State and Columbus State Community College. He soon found his true passion in life, teaching, and started to enjoy his daily activities more when teaching, rather than being in a lab.

After not having a Ph.D, Ohio state told him he couldn’t teach there anymore. This opened up an opportunity for him to come back home to Arizona. Where he took the job as a chemistry teacher at Phoenix Country Day. 

When he first got here the esports program was already being run by another teacher, Eric Heideman, he and Heideman shared the responsibilities. McVey coached the Smash Bros team, and Heideman coached the Rocket League team. This past year that all changed. 

“Now this year, I’m the guy,” McVey said. “He’s [Heideman] got other stuff to do. He passed everything on to me, we’ve had this program since basically Arizona has allowed statewide competition.” 

Now with him being the head of the whole operation, McVey coaches both the Super Smash bros and Rocket League teams. With the original head of the program leaving this past year, there are challenges that arise with a change like this.

“Scheduling and time,” McVey said. “It was nice before each of us would do two days after school. So I've consolidated what would have been three days by myself down to two, to just double up on practices and games. So the time commitment is tricky. I don’t know the game [Rocket League] as well as he did.” 

Without knowing the game as well, McVey is fortunate to have a team that knows how to practically take care of themselves. The members on the Rocket League team know the game really well, and the only thing he has to do is make sure everyone shows up on time. 

With his main game Super Smash Bros. McVey loves coaching players to help them grow. That aspect is what makes McVey love this program. One of his players on the smash team has seen a lot of growth over the past three years. 

“He came in playing Kirby, which is one of the worst characters in the game,” McVey said. “I gave him a lot of direction and he picked another character that he likes and he has just grown a whole lot. That’s really cool to see from freshman year to junior year.” 

Even with the gaming industry growing over the past couple of years. Mainstream media still can look at competitive gaming as just playing a game. McVey knows that there is a lot more that goes into competing.

“There’s real strategy to it,” McVey said. “Should I stay on the ground? Should I jump? How do I recover? There’s recovery routes, there's learning combo routes and what moves lead into other moves.” 

His players are grateful for the environment that McVey has built. Not every school puts in the time and effort to build a program like what PCD has. 

“For me I’m beyond grateful,” senior Taylor Jarvis said. “Esports is kind of my personality in a lot of ways. I love it. All my extracurriculars are based around it.I’m even more grateful for having Mr. McVey and Mr. Heidemen as coaches, because a lot of schools just don’t care. 

“It’s pretty cool. I never really cared about esports or competitive gaming,” senior Baqer Al Saedi said. “I thought it was boring. Then Mr. Hiedeman got me into that esports mindset about just being competitive.” 

McVey knows that gaming isn’t a stable career option yet. What he does know is that being a part of this program, and environment can help support his kids to different types of careers in media.

“I know that these kids are gonna go and do all kinds of stuff, and maybe video gaming is part of it,” McVey said. “I think a lot of kids here are going to use skills in video games and surrounding video gaming. Some of the seniors last year that graduated were interested in stream production and running live events."