Radford Esports Reduces Hours Ahead of Relocation

By: Brandon Whitaker

Radford Esports has been one of the fastest growing communities on campus. Now in their fourth year as an organization the students were met with a bit of a scare regarding the Esports center’s hours of operation, this past Labor Day weekend. On Wednesday August 27th the Esports community was notified via Discord of an incoming change to the availability of the center. When the Esports program was first implemented on campus, they were open from noon to 10, last year the hours were noon to midnight, the new updated schedule will see the center open for students-

 Monday to Thursday from 4-8 p.m. 

Fridays and Saturdays from 2 p.m. to midnight 

Sundays 5-9 p.m. 

The change is partly due to the Esports staff being in a transition period. 

The Esports center will be relocated from Cook Hall room 107 to Peters Hall, and the plan is for the facility to open this January. Doug Benedict the Associate Director of Esports spoke of some of the plans for the new center-

“…we are opening a new facility in January. In January we’ll be moving to Peter’s Hall, and we’ll be moving into a space much larger than the space we’re in right now. We will have a larger community space. We’ll have an arena style space that will serve as additional community space, but also a place to host competition because in the past, we have posted competition and had to shut down this space, which takes away from (the rest of) our community.”

There was a belief among some students that school officials were interfering with the organization due to concerns of students spending too much time in the center, or perhaps skipping class to play video games causing grades to drop but Benedict denied the rumor-

“No, I don’t think that’s the case. Do I understand where that’s coming from? Yeah, I think that students are defensive, certainly over the space. I think students really love this space and I think we’ve provided a lot of access in the past. I wouldn’t say the administration is out to get anybody, I think the biggest thing that happened is we’re just in a transitional period right now. Like I said, we’re opening this new facility. we’re looking for a long-term solution to providing access to our students…what we really did when we determined the current hours is we looked at our check-in data, and said, okay, this is when most students are swiping in and this is when we need to have open hours.” 

Doug Benedict assured the Tartan that the data collected from students visiting the center does not suggest that their visits are impeding their academic success. Benedict and the rest of the staff are still committed to having the Esports center open and available for students as much as possible and would like to see the hours revert to what they were last year when the time is right.