The initial selection process is over, we now have rosters for most titles with only Apex Legends left to sort out.

Check out the teams in the teams section above. All of the students are part of our Representative Esports provision and will be preparing and training from 12:20 every wednesday. Each team will have a weekly plan to cover everything from fitness, nutrition, team sessions, VOD review, analyst sessions, and scouting.

We are competing in the British Esports Open in Rocket League, Overwatch 2, Valorant, and League of Legends. You will be able to track our progress on this site.

We will be hosting trials this year to help with the selection of players. The trials will happen for all British Esports Student Champs titles. Although these are aimed at new students, existing players are welcome to come along. Our teams will have some carry over players from last season so spaces on our top teams may be limited. We will always ensure our best players are in TRC Cobras teams.

We will also need to have substitute players and each of these will be given an alternative role to play as well. For example a player might be a substitute for our top rocket league team, but they will also be assigned a role to scout the opposition players or watch upcoming opponents in a streamed game.

TRIAL DATES:

• F1 23 : 30/08/23 - 11am
• RL: 30/08/23 - 11am
• Valorant: 31/08/23 - 1pm
• LoL: 30/08/23 - 1pm
• Overwatch2: 1/9/23 - 9am

Each trial will be an opportunity to record your ranks, abilities and preferred roles. But each trial will involve you playing the game as well. The F1 23 trial will require you to complete a time trial of 3 laps on the Silverstone circuit with the assist settings of Student Racing League.

After a successful first season in esports we wanted to build on this and further improve and expand the esports opportunities available. In 2022/23 we expanded the titles offered and add more teams, this included entering League of Legends and Overwatch2. We also organised a few events including TRC Brawl and the South Yorkshire Rocket League Cup. We also started Rep Esports, to allow our teams to practice and prepare.

2022/23 also included a few disappointments with the FIFA and Minecraft opportunities not materialising. Also the Apex Legends tournament opportunities vanished one by one with the organisers cancelling their events. We also had a disappointing season with none of our teams making it to the National Divisons, and none of our Division 1 teams made it past the first round elimination.

2023/24 will see us develop further and expand the role students play within our organisation. We want to be student led and run, our role should be to supervise and potentially cover any gaps.

ORGANISATION

We really want to be a student led organisation so we will seek to appoint students to key areas including Player Management, Coaching, Scouting & Analysis, Social Media, Content Creation, and a Player Representitive.

2023/24 will see the introduction of player contracts and all players will need to sign and agree to the terms and conditions. Every player must join the TRC Cobras Discord server, and select their availability on a weekly basis. We will also ensure that any student playing on a non academy team must be signed onto Rep Esports.

In order to avoid the situation of folding a team we will only be adding a new team if existing teams already have sufficient substitutes.

CONTENT

We will stream one Student Champs title every week. We will try to vary the title as much as possible to ensure equal coverage.

We will really push social media in 2023/24. We will appoint a student to this role and will aim to generate posts on a weekly cycle to cover pre & post game, streaming schedules, and other esports related news.

STUDENT CHAMPS

We will enter teams in the following titles:

• Rocket League
• Valorant
• League of Legends
• Overwatch 2

We will enter two drivers in the Student Racing League, the new collaboration between British Esports and Williams Esports.

FIFA/Football should be back for the 2023/24 season, when any announcement is made we will look to organise an entry. This is currently very unclear with the current state of EA/FIFA etc.

OTHER OPPORTUNITIES

We will continue to organise events to expand the opportunities beyond the Student Champs. This will include organising the TRC BrawlHalla Invitational (open to all colleges), and the TRC Brawl (TRC students only).

Once the Student Champs schedule is published we will also organise the South Yorkshire Rocket League Cup . We will invite every South Yorkshire based Student Champs Rocket League team and use it to practice between the winter and spring splits.

New to 2023/24 will be some fun tournaments using Fall Guys including a tournament for both staff and students.

POTENTIAL OPPORTUNITIES

We will look to organise other events to expand the overall participation and the titles our students can compete in. We will potentially organise tournaments in eFootball, Halo Infinite, and Destiny 2.

We will look to enter Minecraft based esports. 2021/22 was the first season for MCCL but nothing materialised for 2022/23, so opportunities might be difficult to find.

We will form a team to compete in Apex Legends tournaments, however previous tournament opportunities have vanished so we will look at other opportunities via Challenger Mode. We will aim to enter at least 1 tournament per month but the scheduling of events seems to give only a week or so notice.

We have sourced two sim racing frames, and two sets of Logitech wheels and pedals (One is for PS5/PC and the other is XBOX/PC). We have also sourced some screens and some monitor stands to complete the hardware. We will have one of our PS5 & one of our Xbox Series X moved into the sim racing room as soon as possible.

One of our esports students has already tested them with the PC version of F1 22 and was very happy with the setup so far. I have also got a copy of the briefing pack from the 2022 pilot events, so any driver will need to have the following off:

• Steering Assist
• Braking Assist
• Dynamic Racing Line
• Pit Assist
• ERS Assist
• DRS Assist

We have organised a date for the F1 selection trials so remember to sign up for Rep Esports at enrollment. The trials will be 5 minutes to sort out the rig and get you comfortable, then another 5 minutes to have a bit of practice, and finally at least a three lap time trial. The circuit will be announced closer to the trials.

On wednesday British Esports dropped the bomb which totally changed the direction and focus of TRC Cobras for the 2023/24 season. In conjunction with Williams Esport, 2023/24 will see the National Student Racing League. Sim Racing is something we have thought about before but always ignored it due to a lack of a competitive space to compete against other schools and colleges.

The details are currently sketchy, with further info coming soon. We are therefore looking to put together an entry level setup with the aim to improve our provision over time. The plan is to start with Logitech g29 / g920 / g923 wheels and pedals, these are established and accepted to be one of the best non-direct drive wheels. At the moment we are planning to set up an Xbox based rig and a PS5 based rig, this setup will allow us to swap in a PC if required.

We have been talking about this for a long time and I have been asking other colleges about their sim racing setup. All of the colleges said they had started down the Logitech route, with some progressing down the direct drive route and others sticking with the trusted Logitech setup. 2022/23 did see a couple of races involving multiple colleges on an informal basis, these showed that the colleges with the best setup didn't normally win the races. Colleges using the Logitech setup still felt competitive and the results did show that as well.

We will keep you posted.

This week finally saw the completion of the TRC Brawl 2023, previous weeks had been postponed due to illness. The event wasn't streamed in the end due to an issue with our mixing desk and our casters were both ill. The event was for TRC students to compete against each other to determine the TRC Brawl Champion.

Our Brawlhalla team (Gemini FRI, and Iyvern FRI) couldn't enter, they have beaten the top players in the world so it would be a little unfair. The remaining players battled it out in a round robin format. Each match was a best of three with a free choice of character, with some players deciding to play to their strengths with their preferred character and others trusting randomness and fate.

Our overall winner and TRC Brawl Champion is...... 'DJVras', narrowly beating 'Sam' 2-1 in their round robin game with 'Sam' taking the runner up spot.

Tomorrow will finally see our first TRC Brawl, a Brawlhalla solo tournament for TRC students. The tournament will be run as a group stage with all entrants playing each other in best of 3 matches. Points will be awarded for a win (3) and for a loss (1), the group winner will be the TRC Brawl 2023 Champion.

Our official TRC Cobras Brawlhalla team will be on hand for advice, and hopefully to shoutcast the event. The finale of the tournament will be an opportunity for the entrants to battle 'Gemini FRI' & 'Ivyern FRI' in a 2v6 or potentially two 1v4 matches.

We are looking to organise more community esports opportunities for TRC students, so watch this space for future events.

After an amazing and entertaining final, TRC Cobras Academy are your Division 2 Valorant Champions for the 2022/23 season.

The final was live on the Student Champs twitch stream and can be found HERE. It was our first final ever and our only official appearance on a British Esports stream of the season.

Watch the above stream if you can, but I won't spoil it by detailing the scores. I have ripped the footage from twitch for us to save but we can't really upload it online

Following from our previous news item, the TRC Cobras Academy Valorant team have made it to the Division 2 Grand Final. This was following the 13-10 victory over Serentity_Val, we seemed to make the game tighter than it should have been with some poor teamwork and dare I say complacency. We had a devasting start on attack establishing a clear lead.

We had decided to take the night off from streaming, so I watched it from the oppositions stream. This involved just one of their players screens, but also their entire team comms (ps I had zero contact with our team so this wasn't any sort of advantage). The team comms was an interesting listen, the normal "I don't know who I keep coming up against but they are clearly cheating, their shots are unreal". The comms also made it clear they had watched some of our other games and looked at the stats and accounts of our players.

The game some how got to 9-9 despite for example one round on attack with 30 seconds left and still 5v5, all 5 players of Serenity died within 4 seconds of each other. The 9-9 score line seemed to refocus our efforts to finish off the match.

The final will be on Wednesday (10/05/2023) at 4pm (still awaiting confirmation) and should be streamed on the British Esports Twitch Channel. I'll post a link here when we have everything confirmed. For students at TRC, we are planning to have a watch party in/around S11. The final is a best of 3 rounds so be prepared for a long stay, if it went all the way we could be leaving at about 7pm.

Our second year double students organised their Unit 5 Esports Event this week. A multi game tournament to find the best all round players. Teams of upto 6, competed in a 3v3 Brawlhalla Brawl, followed by a 3v3 Rocket League match and finished off with a 3v3 in Halo Infinite.

Students set up a view area with a large screen to allow spectators to watch the tournament unfold. They also set up the competition devices and the entire stream setup. In the down time players and spectators could have a go at a series of challenges and a gaming quiz. The individual with the highest all round score on the challenges won a TRC Cobras jersey.

Congratulations to Nebvlx's team, having our best Brawlhalla player on your team really gave you a good start to the tournament. The Jersey was won by an Esports student called Ethan with over 14 mouse clicks per second, and an average reaction time of less than 0.22 seconds.

Student of the day was clearly WIll, he was responsible for the spectator events and even put away all of the tables and chairs on his own, he wasn't there when we said to leave them until the morning. Overall the event was a success and has set a high benchmark for future events.

You can watch the stream HERE

The first elimination round was a difficult one for TRC Cobras. Our Overwatch team lost in their elimination game, this was a disappointing end to their season, but after a Winter promotion reaching the elimination stage in the higher division was a real achievement.

Rocket League saw our Academy team defeated in a very onside game, but again we earned our Winter promotion and have been adapting to life in Division 1 North. Our main Rocket League team, TRC Cobras, had a tough game against KE6 Vanguard. This was a chalk and cheese affair with the Cobras losing 3-2. We fought hard to overturn a poor first game, but ran out of steam in the decider.

Valorant was a more successful affair with a dominant victory in the Division 2 elimination game to reach the next phase. We go on to play Brentwood Eagles next week.

Next week will see the start of the playoffs for the Grand Final Lan.

We have qualified for the Division 1 North Playoffs in Overwatch (TRC Cobras), and Rocket League (Both TRC Cobras & Cobras Academy). Our Valorant team have also qualified for the Division 2 Playoffs.

Each title will have different qualifying criteria, each Division 1 title & region will have its own grand final LAN. In Overwatch the top 3 teams per group qualify, with TRC Cobras finishing 3rd in Group C of Division 1 North. In Rocket League the top 4 teams per group qualify, TRC Cobras Finished 3rd in Group A of Division 1 North and TRC Cobras Academy finished 4th in Group G of Division 1 North.

Division 2 is organised differently, with both Division 2 South & Division 2 North combined in the playoffs with a single grand final LAN. Only the group winners qualified for the playoffs, TRC Cobras Academy Valorant team qualified as the winners of Group E.

Our opponents will be announced next week, so there will be a small turn around between the announcement and the game itself.

From the start of the Spring Split we have started to ramp up our streaming output. In week one we streamed Rocket League to YouTube with the two TRC Cobras teams winning both games. This stream was planned very differently to what actually went out live. ManxBazza designed the graphics and overlays, students had been lined up to shoutcast but due to illness they couldn't make it, so we had to shoutcast the game ourselves. The ouptut was decent but not what we wanted in the long term, you can watch it Here.

Week 2 was a League of Legends stream over Twitch, this went more to plan and we had a student shoutcaster. The shoutcasting was excellent, however we left OBS audio set to monitor for most of it and only caught the end of the game.

Week 3 (last week) was more inline with what we wanted. Students helped at all stages of the process with Nebvlx setting up the equipment and Gemini (FRI) / or the Rizzler shoutcasting. The graphic were mainly created by ManxBazza with editing by Nebvlx. You can watch the stream Here

Week 4 improved our stream even more with two student shout casters, and again student support to set everything up. We still needed to run the stream with Nebvlx dropping into the Valorant team to cover a late drop out. The other big addition was replay and highlight clips. You can watch the stream Here

Week 5 was another Overwatch 2 stream and was again an improvement on our previous output. You can watch the stream Here

Our Brawlhalla players are still training hard for the upcoming Ghost League and Brawlhalla Esports events. They are consistently around or above 1800 elo. This week they have played the best 2 players in the world on 2 separate occasions and won.

Everyone here at TRC Cobras are so proud with the progress of Gemini & Ivyern, keep up the hard work and remember to keep it fun and real.

Now the winter split has drawn to a conclusion, our final Wednesday saw the inaugural Winter Split Awards. We have created 5 awards in total for the best player, best manager/IGL, best team, most improved player, and our Garth Ragna Award for the player who has made the biggest transformation to their lifestyle, well being, fitness, and diet to improve their in-game performance.

We now have a store to purchase TRC Cobras apparel, this can be accessed from the navigation bar or by accessing https://esk.gg/collections/trc-cobras

Our friends at ESK have also designed our new jersey:

ESK have also designed our new hoodie:

Congratulations to BSA Griffins for winning the inaugural South Yorkshire RL Cup, it was a dominating performance which no team could deal with or counter.

The final positions:
1st) BSA Griffins
2nd) TRC Cobras Academy
3rd) Maltby Miners
3rd) Dearne Valley Minotaurs

Match one was contested by TRC Cobras Academy and Maltby Miners, with TRC coming out on top with a 2-0 win in the best of 3 match. Match two saw BSA Griffins take on Dearne Valley Minotaurs, with BSA Griffins winning the match 2-0.

Match three was contested by the two losers from match one & two. This game was abandoned in the end due to a invading troll who kept joining the game. Therefore i have listed both Maltby Miners and Dearne Valley Minotaurs in joint third place.

Match four was the final between TRC Cobras Academy and BSA Griffins. A very one sided game 1 created a slightly closer game 2, but with the same BSA Griffins victory. They claimed the final with a convincing 2-0 win, so BSA Griffins are your undisputed Rocket League Champions of South Yorkshire for 2022. All South Yorkshire Student Champs teams received an invite, and hopefully next year we can get a full tournament and an expanded format.

This was our first adventure into organising a tournament, and to say it was a learning curve would be an understatement. The students we had organised for running the stream and casting each game failed to show due to illness, this meant we just put out the game footage to test our streaming setup. The planned streaming setup had to change last minute due to restrictions on the streaming PC (we couldn't fix the in game audio). We moved to plan B and streamed everything from a XBOX Series X instead and annoyingly it worked first time.

I want to personally apologise if the chat on the feed included any inappropriate comments, we at TRC Cobras are fully committed to developing an organisation in which all are welcome and valued. The original plan was for a student to monitor and run the chat.

So it ended up being a one person operation which was very tough to do at the same time as organising other teams and games. We also in the future will try to only use discord for communication, this would allow us to only send the competing teams the lobby details. One of the games was spoiled by another player joining the game, but unfortunately I didn't notice in time to block the player. The game was abandoned in the end.

We will certainly learn from this experience and create a smoother running tournament next time.

Get Wednesday November 2nd 2022 in your diary, we are organising the South Yorkshire RL Cup 2022. Games will be played between 4pm & 5:30pm in the normal Student Champs slot. All games will be best of 3 instead of the normal best of 5, this will cut down the potential game time. We have students ready to run the stream and cast the games.

4 teams have entered the inaugural South Yorkshire RL Cup, TRC Cobras Academy, BSA Griffins, Dearne Valley Minotaurs, & Maltby Miners. We had also invited the NCD Vulcans (New College Doncaster) and the XI-Blades RL (Sheffield United Community College), the remaining South Yorkshire teams. However we will close entries and run to the following tournament plan.

Tournament Plan

The TRC students streaming will create the private lobby for the playing teams to join. The matches will be:
Match 1 (16:00): TRC Cobras Academy (1) vs Maltby Miners (3)
Match 2 (16:25): BSA Griffins (2) vs Dearne Valley Minotaurs (4)
Match 3 (16:50): Match 1 Loser vs Match 2 Loser
Match 4 (17:15): Match 1 Winner vs Match 2 Winner

I have sent invitations to all South Yorkshire teams competing in the British Esports Student Champs Rocket League section. These include New College Doncaster, Dearne Valley College, Barnsley College, Maltby Academy, and Sheffield United Community College.

The proposal is to play a mini league on November 2nd, the week before the group stages for the Student Champs. We at TRC will only enter one of our teams, but could enter more in order to make up the numbers. We propose best of 3 matches to reduce the time required, and the exact format will be decided when everyone as responded to the invitations.

We are wanting to stream the event and have currently got a student willing to run the stream, and we are looking for casters as we speak.

We at TRC Esports will be hosting a Brawlhalla tournament on the 19th October, this will coincide with some Student Champs down time. We are hosting it via challenger mode and it will be for duos. The minimum number of teams required is 4 and the maximum is currently set to 8, this will allow us to run the tournament within the 4 to 6pm window of a normal Student Champs wednesday.

You can access the tournament from this link.The tournament is currently set to invite only so if you want to play contact us using the email address or the contact form on the contact us page. This will be our first attempt at tournament hosting so please bare that in mind if you do decide to enter.

You will be competing for the TRC Brawlhalla Invitational Cup, hopefully the first of many Brawlhalla events we want to organise.

After our first week of 2022/23 we have updated our esports plan. We had to make changes due to the change in valorant start time, and confirmation that players can play from home if they can't play from online.

We are going to enter the the Student Champs in:

• Rocket League
• Valorant
• League of Legends
• Overwatch 2
• FIFA 23

We will also look beyond the Student Champs to also enter the Minecraft Collegiate League. We will also form a team to compete in Apex Legends with the aim to enter at least 1 tournament per month .

We have been looking at tournament organisation via Challenger Mode. We could use this to organise some community tournaments for games such as Street Fighter 5, Tekken 7, FIFA, eFootball, or Brawlhalla.

Check out our Esports Plan 2022/23 from the About tab above.

We have created a space on Challengermode for TRC esports community events & tournaments. Challengermode is a platform to bring together communities and players, from the player point of view it makes it easy to sign up for and compete in tournaments. From the community point of view it gives us a space to coordinate esports activities and to also schedule and run tournaments covering many titles.

So if you are interested in esports and are currently studying at TRC, we would recommend you join Challengermode ASAP. You can find the TRC esports space HERE .

All events will be restricted to TRC students, and the most effective way of doing this is to make all tournaments invite only. This will prevent anyone from just entering the tournament, we propose to either distribute the invite over college email (therefore restricting it to students) or interested students will be able to request an invite.

Our first events will be for Rocket League with the TRC 1v1 Cup,and the TRC 2v2 Cup on the 14th September 2022. The 1v1 action will start from 15:30 and the 2v2 action willl be from 16:30, both will be a single elimination format to crown the overall winner.

After a successful first season in esports we at TRC want to build on this and further improve and expand the esports opportunities available.

We are going to enter the the Student Champs in:

• Rocket League
• Valorant
• League of Legends
• FIFA 23

We will also look beyond the Student Champs to also enter the Minecraft Collegiate League. We currently have 2 builders and will be recruiting upto 5 Duel , Spleef, or Bedwars specialists. We will also form a team to compete in Apex Legends with the aim to enter at least 1 tournament per month . The first tournament will be Vulpine Esports VALS5.

We have recruited a Brawlhalla duo, they currently play in-game tournaments and are interested in playing other students around the UK.

Check out our Esports Plan 2022/23 from the About tab above.