By: Brady Behrend, Sports Editor
“This experience has been great,” Kimm said. “To build the program from scratch, to see our eSports room totally change… it’s been a lot of fun.”
This year, new coach Curt Kimm led the Coe College eSports team through its inaugural season.
“This experience has been great,” Kimm said. “To build the program from scratch, to see our eSports room totally change… it’s been a lot of fun.”
Before Kimm made his way to Coe College, he got a degree in elementary education at the University of Northern Iowa, where he studied from 2007 to 2011. His first coaching experience came in his senior year of college, where Kimm coached eight-man football at Janesville High School. From there, he coached freshman football at Linn-Mar High School. Kimm also has experience coaching middle school basketball and middle school track.
“The different ways to bring together teams, to find out who the leaders are on the team, that’s all stuff I brought over from traditional sports.”
“You can definitely take some things from traditional sports for eSports,” Kimm said. “The different ways to bring together teams, to find out who the leaders are on the team, that’s all stuff I brought over from traditional sports.”
Around this time, Kimm got his master’s degree in athletic administration from Ohio University. After that, Kimm finally arrived at Coe to coach defensive backs for the football team for a season.
Bobby Tornabene (‘22), President of the eSports club at Coe, was a member of the interview council when Coe conducted a search for a full-time coach to lead the new program. Tornabene played an integral role in the founding of the varsity eSports program.
“I got to sit and ask a bunch of questions about the position,” Tornabene said. “He reminded me a lot of myself when he spoke about his passion for eSports.”
Gabe Etzel, a former Coe student and coach of the League of Legends eSports team, offered to help Kimm in whatever way possible in January of 2021.
“I think Coe eSports is off to the best start possible under Coach Kimm’s leadership,” Etzel said. “He has so much passion for what he does… any first-year program is going to have its struggles, but I can see how he learns throughout the process.”
Kimm has already learned a lot from the first two semesters coaching the new eSports program.
“We went into this year a little overzealous thinking we could do as many titles as possible at the varsity level,” Kimm said. “We had between seven or eight titles between the first two semesters and that is just too many.”
Kimm does not just coach the eSports team, but he also takes care of many other aspects of the program as well.
“In some ways, he almost feels like an eSport athletic director,” Tornabene said. “he does a wonderful job at trying to get as many students involved as possible.”
“He takes care of so much stuff,” Etzel said. “Stuff like recruiting, organizing study tables, and ECAC league compliance.”
For the future, Kimm plans on reorganizing the eSport titles played at the varsity level and the club level.
“Next year, we will be going down to four titles as a varsity and the rest will be club,” said Kimm. “This will help revitalize the club atmosphere… I think it is really important to have the more casual side as well to hopefully bring in more students into the realm of eSports.”