Western’s eSports varsity coach Kush Sharma has become one of the best gamers in the world

STORY BY FORREST DIMOND | PHOTOS BY JAKE TULL

(Above) Kush Sharma plays a League of Legends game after watching a match, in his dorm room at Buchannan Towers. Sharma coaches for Western’s League of Vikings, the League of Legends team on campus and also coaches players online for $15 an hour

A packed house in the Staples Center of downtown Los Angeles explodes into applause as the five members of South Korea Telecom 1 stand up from their computers and throw their hands into the air. Kush Sharma’s eyes are glued to his computer screen, watching it unfold from his home and all he is thinking is, “I could do this.”

The video game that sold out seats in the Staples Center that night was League of Legends; the most played video game in the world on the online gaming platform Raptr. South Korea’s SKT beat China’s Royal Club for $1 million in the 2013 World Championship. It was after seeing this that Sharma knew eSports had a big future. eSports is a term used for professional gaming or any sport that is facilitated on electronic systems.

Since 2013, the viewership of League of Legends has only grown. In 2014, 27 million people streamed the League World Championship, online. That’s more viewers than the World Series (15.8 mil) or the NBA finals series (15.5 mil).

Sharma grew up in India with his mother and father before coming to Western. His mother runs a school for the autistic and his father was a salesman for the motorcycle company, Hero, which was absorbed by Honda. He traveled for his job often and ended up moving to the U.S. It was agreed by his family that Sharma would study in the U.S.

Sharma flew from India to Ohio at the age of 12. This would be his new home and the beginning of his League career; but not without a few bumps. He began playing League of Legends with some online friends he had made. “I was completely awful. I’m talking about one of the worst players,” Sharma says.

This happens to most new players, as League of Legends is a very difficult game to learn. The game is a five-person versus five-person fantasy based team game. Your goal: destroy the enemy base. While that sounds simple, the difficulty comes in the depth of the game.

As a player, Sharma has to keep track of things like “map awareness,” “team composition,” “initiation,” “item builds” and “ganks;” all while right clicking to move his character around the map to kill small minions. The list of concepts a player has to be familiar with is daunting and most of the jargon sounds like nonsense to anyone who hasn’t played the game.

As Sharma was virtually leveling up, he was academically as well. Communicating with his teams in the game actually helped Sharma learn English while he was in junior high school. “It’s insane, I could actually see improvement in how I was talking,” Sharma says. English is his fourth language, Hindi being his native language, followed by Punjabi and Urdu.

Sharma was seriously improving his game and the thought of going pro was always in the back of his head. Scouts for teams often pick up college players that make a name for themselves by ranking highly in the game.

The setting of League of Legends is played on a map of three lanes: the top lane, middle lane and bottom lane, with “jungle” area in between. This is where Sharma found his sweet spot. He plays a role called the “jungler” that controls the pace of the game and makes game-wide decisions for the team. Sharma’s personality of leadership began bleeding outside the game.

After living in Ohio, he moved to Oklahoma for three years and eventually moved to Federal Way, Washington for his senior year of high school. Most would shudder at the thought of uprooting their social lives in their final year of high school, but Sharma took it in stride. It wasn’t the first time he had changed schools, only the sixth. “There was lots of moving around but you know what stayed with me? League of Legends,” Sharma says. Sharma never had trouble making friends because of how active he was in school clubs.

“The biggest factor in League was some of the real life friends I made because of League. It’s because they play that I made this connection with them that is completely different. We can talk about it for so long because there is so much to it,” Sharma says.

He began cultivating a team of the best League players at his high school, Union High School in Federal Way. He entered this team into the High School Starleague, a competition of 800 high schools along the West Coast for a $40,000 scholarship split for the top three teams. HSL intends to legitimize eSports in the athletics of schools by working with the administrators and offering scholarships. Sharma’s team finished in the top eight finalists, winning League of Legends merchandise but no scholarship.

That same year Sharma began attracting the attention of professional team scouts because of his League of Legends ranking. Of the 70 million registered League of Legends players across the world, Sharma was ranked in the top 200 players in North America, also known as Challenger rank. For perspective, Challenger players are ranked greater than the 99.99th percentile of players.

Sharma has played with almost every professional on the scene. He has played most often with the professional by the summoner name of Aphromoo, who plays support for Counter Logic Gaming. CLG just placed second in the Mid Season Invitational.

Today Sharma is a coach for Western’s League of Vikings, the Varsity League of Legends team that competes in the U.S. Collegiate Star League. Western’s team is in the top division of schools, which includes the University of Washington, UC Berkeley and Robert Morris University Illinois. Beating the University of Washington was a high point this year because of the rivalry. The Collegiate Star League dishes out $250,000 in scholarship money to the top winners. Western’s team made it to the playoffs this year, the top 64 schools in the nation, but was knocked out of the competition in the elimination rounds.

Sharma also coaches for the League of Legends coaching website. The website cultivates high ranked players, like Sharma, and lets other players pay for coaching from those players, all of this online. Sharma can talk players through their mistakes or advise them immediately while they are playing the game, at the price of $15 an hour.

Sharma handles coaching, being an engineering student, working 2–3 hours every day at Buchanan Towers and maintaining his current Masters rank (one tier below Challenger) every week. Managing Sharma’s interests is a balancing act. “I’m not going to lie, I catch myself in class wondering ‘will I have time to play League today?’” Sharma says. He usually slips in two games right after his classes, just before work, and tries to get a game or two in before bed. The amount Sharma plays is dependent on his homework because academics take priority over gaming.

For Sharma, going pro would mean abandoning all academics, which is unacceptable at this point. Signing a contract to play with a professional team isn’t any sort of a guarantee. “I might join a team but you never know how good or bad we might be,” Sharma says. Instead, Sharma plans to continue his academics and coaching.

As he looks back, Sharma still enjoys the fantasy of throwing his hands in the air in front of a cheering crowd packed into a giant auditorium watching him play. This dream is not outside of his reach. Maybe one day Kush Sharma, student, tutor and gamer, will also be able to add “Top League of Legends player” to his list of achievements.