A Club Mixer event presented opportunities for El Camino students to bond with fellow students through online games and win from a $1,940 tournament prize pool.

The event, hosted by the Inter-Club Council and Esports Club, was held from Oct. 15 to 16 and had two main parts. On Oct. 15 from 5 to 6 p.m., El Camino College (ECC) students participated in casual online minigames such as “Among Us” and “Gartic Phone” through the ECC Student Life Discord server.

After the casual minigames, the second part was a video game tournament was of the first-person shooter game “Valorant,” which was live-streamed from the ICC Twitch account on Oct. 15 from 7-9 p.m. and Oct. 16 from 6-11 p.m.

“[Club Mixer] is just mainly for all students who enjoy playing together as a community,” Ingrid Barrera, ICC’s director of publicity said. “The Esports team planned to stream it through Twitch so that all the ECC students can support their fellow competitors and friends, to engage and watch with each other.”

Barrera said that this semester’s Club Mixer was also in partnership with the Santa Monica College Esports club which resulted in 17 out of the 61 total tournament participants being students from other colleges in the South Bay area.

“This is also our first attempt at collaboration with a club for an official ICC event,” Luisa Paredes, Esports Club’s vice president said. “ICC has worked with clubs in the past, but not for an event this big, so there’s a lot of bridging together.”

The total sum of the prize pool for the “Valorant” tournament was worth $1,940, where 25 players could receive rewards that included computer monitors, backlit keyboards, gaming mouses, gaming headsets and headset holders for each member of the first, second, third, fourth and fifth teams respectively.

Because prizes were funded by the ECC Associated Students Organization, only ECC students were eligible for the prizes. If a winning team had a non-ECC student, it was transferred to the next ECC student runner-up.

“[ASO fees] go back solely for the students, through programs such as the athletics department, different organizations and is also what funds our prizes,” Aleeza West, ICC president, said. “Which is why we really encourage students to come to these events, it’s your own investment and you can even get more than what you paid for.”

Out of the 12 randomly grouped teams that joined the single-elimination tournament, Team White, which consisted of ECC students Sean Nakamura, Uriel Corona, Emiliano Larios, Angel Gabriel Novoa and Jake Suson won and will all be receiving the first-place prize.

“Even I’m surprised, I didn’t think we would win either,” Jake Suson, an 18-year-old undeclared student at ECC said. “I really want to say thank you to everyone, thank you to my teammates.”

The live stream had a peak of 124 viewers and was commentated by Esports Club members Scott Kaiklian, Rowen Liam Saynes and Andrew Abueme as students cheered for their favorite teams in the live stream chat.

“This year for ICC, one of our big goals is to see an increase in student engagement,” West said.

West said that this semester, ICC made it an initiative to promote student Discord servers especially the Student Life server which increased from 100 to 700 members after a year into the global pandemic.

“We’re still in an online community and we really just wanna show that we are here for students, we understand the struggle of not being able to make many friends right now,” West said. “So be on the lookout for more fun future events that are for the students and by the students.”