The CSL Experience: UCSD

The UCSD team formed in the Winter of 2009 after its annual Winter Games Fest and in that span the team took 3rd in the UCPL, 2nd in CSL’s second season, and 1st in the third season of the CSL, topping the powerhouse team Duke in the Grand Finals. The team has grown from a small group of Starcraft fans to an organization with over 130 members. I’m here to share with you a little bit of the UCSD CSL experience, check out these pictures and video from LAN/Fun events.

Why We're Awesome

The UCSD CSL team usually has practice Monday nights starting at 10pm and running until midnight or 1am, at practices we usually run one or two sets of KOTH games depending on the amount of people who show up (ranges from 6-15!), and try to help each other improve and set lineups for the coming week of CSL matches. The active team consists of about 10 members, the regular players, but the roster itself has more than 40. There are of course, people who are involved with the team but don't participate in the matches, everyone is friendly and tries to do their part though.

McLoviN, AndrewTo, and Cheese are cornerstones of the SC2 team… RandomKorean (2nd from left) was one of the founding members of UCSD Starcraft.

This past weekend, the UCSD CSL team gathered at Joe's Pizza, the usual watering hole for our meetups and team dinner. Joe is pretty fabulous and welcomes tons of nerds to his shop periodically and doesn't get annoyed at the laptops and gaming rigs getting set up. This night however, Joe's was not enough, the team decided to run over to campus to have a little LAN in the school's Computer Science lab. Although the computers don't support SC2, enough people had Brood War on their flash drives to set up some epic drama.

Gathering around to watch a game of Broodwar!

While there are many holdovers from the previous year's CSL roster (Broodwar), including Cheese, TOP, and AndrewTo... most of the roster are newcomers to the team, and even to the school. KvZ is perhaps the strongest recent addition, and is one of America's top Zerg players (although he's been recently devoured by the WoW bug). xmShake, McLoviN, Seadee, and Malvarialin make up the rest of the core team. McLoviN and TOP are an up and coming 2on2 squad that will prove to be a deadly combination come playoff time... or just show that the TZ combination is as imbalanced in SC2 as it was in BW!

xmShake... horrible at BW (ez wins, gg!) but is shaping up to be quite a solid SC2 player for UCSD CSL... and is only a freshman

UCSD CSL is more than just a competitive Starcraft 2 team, its a collection of people who simply love the game and like to share their passions with other people. Our meetups always gather at least 20 people, most of whom are not even on the CSL roster... the great thing about UCSD is its abundance of Starcraft fans; UCSD CSL has given those people a place to congregate and meet fellow nerds, make them feel like they're not alone. And yes, there are even girls who partake in the action (in a totally non sexual way) - breaking the stereotype of a male dominated industry.

We filled a room with SC2 nerds, no problem for us... just a typical day for the UCSD CSL group

Luckily, we were able to get some footage of an 8 man race-war between UCSD CSL players... there were 3 Terrans, 3 Zergs, and two Protosses. Unfortunately, Protoss was double-teamed by the greedy Terrans and Zergs, being eliminated early... Terran and Zerg duked it out for another 20 minutes before Zerg finally emerged victorious, too bad Jaedong couldn't utilize this imbalance against Flash in Brood War. Check it out:

Why is UCSD so successful in the CSL? Hopefully this has shed a little light on the UCSD CSL experience - through the sheer number of players (and Koreans), along with the friendship that has developed between the players, the team is poised for success. After struggling in the early season, and losing two matches (to Rutgers and rival team UC Irvine), UCSD has stormed back and is making a strong playoff push. The second half of the season will surely show what the defending champions are made of.

Hopefully you all have enjoyed a little bit of UCSD, I encourage you all to share your own school's experience! As a final note, enjoy this other video from UCSD's first ever SC2 LAN!