Jukes

I'm a student at UNCW in Wilmington, NC. I've played Smash competitively since December 2013. I started out playing PM and then in January 2015 I started playing Melee. For the first year and a half of college, I was consistently trying to find a Smash community in Wilmington and I was struggling quite badly. I got very tired of searching and not finding anything so I decided to try to build the Smash community here in Wilmington myself. During Christmas break of 2014, I started a UNCW Super Smash Bros. group on Facebook and began to advertise it and try to build this Smash community. Throughout the entire semester, I was advertising in classes and around campus here-and-there in simple conversation that I played Smash competitively. After a few months, people began showing interest and I even found a group of people at a tournament that had been playing on their own for a while at UNCW. The Smash community soon exploded here, but I didn't see many people looking to travel to tournaments or with motivation to get REALLY good. There were definitely some people with this motivation, but I wanted to see this motivation in many more people. I was given the idea by an old school Wilmington Smasher, Bryan "SlasherKing" Allison, to start a Wilmington PR to get people motivated to get on this list. Everyone likes seeing their name on a list of "the Top 5 Best" and so I really wanted this to get people practicing, I wanted salt to build and rivalries to form, etc. In the last month of the semester, I ran 3 qualifiers (one per week) that would determine the first Top 5 PR list for Wilmington. A few people told me that nobody would show up or that if people did show up, it wouldn't be many at all. However, the first qualifier had 19 people, the second had 18, and the third had 12. The qualifiers went extremely well and yielded great feedback. With the first PR list released, there was so much motivation and excitement in the group. Now, I want to continue to help grow this community so that when I leave, there will be an established Wilmington Smash community and nobody else will have to spend a year and a half searching for one.

- R&T | Jukes