Pace University’s Smash Scene

Pace University, located in New York City, has a growing Super Smash Bros. Ultimate scene. Despite everything recent that has gone on in the past year, the people who run this scene have made things work out.

Their scene is more widely recognized as The Smash Society. It was founded around five years ago after a thread on r/smashbros encouraged college students to find fellow students who express interest in creating a campus scene.

“Our co-founder and first president “Stage Hazard” showed his interest in starting a smash club at Pace and our other co-founder “Napulian” messaged him expressing interest in starting the club,” said “Mirage,” (who wished to not provide a full name) who was the former Vice President of the Vice President of The Smash Society before graduating from Pace in Spring 2021. “They got some equipment set up and found others to join and that’s how the first few meetings began.”

The Board

There are four board positions each semester: President, Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer. For the Fall 2021 semester, the President will be Jon-Joel “YajYaj” Ocfemia, the Vice President will be “682shadow” (who never responded to interview), the Secretary will be “Zagreus” (who wished to not provide a full name) and the Treasurer will be Seth “Patriot” Ryan Kim. Each position plays a role in making the scene grow.

“I’m the one that brings the eboard together in order to let the club run as well as possible,” said YajYaj. “Each eboard member has their own specific tasks and I just bring them all together.”

“My job involved working with the president to do a lot of heavy-lifting when it came to running tournaments as TO and organizing events,” said Mirage. “I personally took up a lot of jobs for myself including creating and running our social media, designing graphics for rankings and tourney results, deciding the final player rankings, as well as other miscellaneous tasks whenever the situation calls for it.”

“I know I am expected to take notes of e-board meetings, handle the club’s messages with the faculty and staff of our college, and bring up any problems that have been addressed to me for the whole e-board,” said Zagreus.

According to Patriot, the role of treasurer involves “organizing and managing the club budget in order to receive equipment, catering, and other things we’d need/want to operate smoothly on the level we want to achieve our club’s mission.”

Events

Despite Pace being located in New York City, which was a hotspot for the pandemic, they were able to host an in-person weekly in both the Fall and Spring Semesters.

“Our in-person tournaments are open to anyone, taking advantage of Pace’s lax guest policy, but obviously they did away with that because of COVID and we had to implement strict health precautions,” said Mirage. “We still welcomed kids from other colleges to compete in our Wi-Fi tournaments, with a particular number from CUNY College of Staten Island because we have so many friends there.”

Pace also held two female and non-binary only brackets in an effort to make the smash scene more inclusive.

“We collaborated with Pace’s Women in Tech to have one Fall and one Spring tourney for female and non-binary players to open up in our typically male-dominated community,” said Mirage. “The brackets were small but they were a lot of fun to run and commentate, and the fact that me and JJ were already good friends with their President and Treasurer made planning very easy,” he added.

“Going into the next semester I’m planning to facilitate a sort of “Return to form” in my role and help recreate the offline space we had before the pandemic, with some of what we picked up over the previous semesters of course,” said Patriot.

Power Rankings

Image courtesy of The Smash Society

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