The Marist esports team has a new 23-monitor practice room along with two competition rooms and a flatscreen dedicated solely to Super Smash Bros. Even considering all the improvements, the most important upgrade is something simpler: air conditioning.
When asked what excites the team about their new renovations, they replied nearly in sync:
“AC and just the amount of more space.”
Since its inception in 2015, the Red Fox esports program has grown into a dominant force in the MAAC, finishing consistently at the top of the league. Bringing home multiple championships in recent seasons, the Gaming Foxes have built their success while tucked away in the basement of the Hancock Center.
That all began to change over winter break.
Members of the esports executive board received an unexpected email announcing that the university had secured a generous donation to construct a new esports lab from Wappingers Falls-based gaming studio Contenders, the same facility that hosted last year’s MAAC tournament.
As Contenders prepared to sell its space, the company donated all of its PCs, monitors and desks to the Marist Athletic Department. With an influx of new equipment and limited room in the existing location, Director of Athletics Tim Murray began working to move the program out of the basement into a more visible and spacious area in Donnelly Hall.
“We all also recognize that esports correlates in terms of admissions and recruitment. There are also a lot of people on our teams who came here because of our esports team. That was a factor, if not the primary factor,” said Assistant Athletic Director for Club Sports Stephen D’Alessandro. “Just being able to now have a room where it is going to be very visible for any student that is coming in. It is going to be one of the best, if not the best, esports facilities in the MAAC.”
Marist unveiled the new facility to the public just in time for the university’s admitted students weekends. In years past, many prospective students toured the Poughkeepsie campus without even a glance at where the esports lab is, and now the space has become a highlight of university tours.
Much of Marist’s current executive board and team based their college decision on universities that offered competitive esports programs. Coincidentally, senior members of the team remember talking to their younger teammates during their tours of Marist.
“I talked to this guy [freshman Aidan Joyner] on Admitted Students Day. I brought him over here. The club is probably one of the things that brought them here to Marist,” said junior vice president Daniel Borgen.
As of the 2025-26 season, the esports club is made up of 13 separate teams competing for five MAAC titles under League of Legends, Overwatch, Valorant, Super Smash Bros. and Rocket League. The rest of the teams compete in a sub-league conference called the NECC (National Esports Collegiate Conference) that offers different competitions based on interest each year.
This year, the Red Foxes fell short of any MAAC title, losing to Quinnipiac in the finals in Overwatch and the semi-finals in both Super Smash Bros and League of Legends.
With a variety of options to compete and play in, the current esports roster sits at 51, and in the team’s home in Hancock, it became virtually impossible for everyone to meet at once.
The Hancock E-Games lab housed just 12 monitors total, split between two competition rooms.
“Those rooms are like little shoeboxes,” said Borgen. “It is really hard when there are a lot of people in each room. When there are more than six people in each room, it is just hot and gross.”
With a big team and small rooms, the team has had to be dynamic in where they hold events. Large team functions have needed to find a second spot, whether that be in the river rooms of the Murray Student Center or virtual gaming hangouts.
“We usually cannot host the events in Hancock because the space is so small. We can only have as many people on the team at a time. So it would be hard to have more than 20 people in there at once, but a lot of our events for esports are very team-based,” said freshman secretary Aiden Joyner.
Donnelly will not only provide the team with air conditioning but also a place for everyone to come together and separate practice from competition, with no worries of overheating. Some members of the program have never even met in person because of the lack of space to cross-mingle between teams.
“I experienced it when I went to the MAAC championship tournament for them in 2024 down in Atlantic City,” said D’Alessandro. “I was watching people getting there and meeting each other for the first time. It was crazy because they know who each other are, but they all know each other by gamer tags and they can’t put names to faces.”
The new lab in Donnelly, which has started to come to life in what was the Donnelly Computer Center, was laid out strategically by the E-Games board members themselves in collaboration with Marist Athletics.
Within the lab, there will be a 23-monitor practice room attached to two competition rooms with six monitors each and a television monitor for Super Smash Bros.
“We are going to have TVs in there so they can review videos as a part of practicing. They can also then communicate better because they’re in person, they are going to also have whiteboards, so they can drop game plans before they actually start to get into games, all those things they don’t currently have,” said D’Alessandro.
The newly created lab, shaped through collaboration, aims to unite a program that has been divided for years. In Donnelly, the esports lab is growing with the continued standard of an established program. Marist has been pushing the construction on social channels, creating a more visible presence for the program online and as you walk around campus.
“I was a game design major looking for an esports program while touring schools and getting to see the people more than the space itself was important to me,” said Joyner. “But I know some people are really attracted to the space, so the new space is going to be huge.”
Esports is a competitive environment at times, but it is also a community for like-minded individuals to come together, just as much as the team and its members want to win.
With a new innovative space, conversations have begun that the team has never dreamed of. With talks of recruiting efforts for the program beginning and a possible home MAAC playoff tournament on the horizon for next year, Marist esports is no longer tucked in the dark of Hancock’s basement.
Edited by Max Rosen and Ava Battinelli
Photos by Nelson Echeverria/Marist University
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