Bournemouth University have been chosen as the Pot Noodle Society of the Month for July!
We spoke to their president, JamJam, to find out more...
Congratulations on being selected as our Pot Noodle Society of the Month! Let's hear a bit about what Bournemouth have been getting up to!
July has been an incredibly busy month for us. Although the Summer months are quieter, it gives us a brilliant opportunity to test new events and ideas before the start of the next academic year. We have welcomed our new Committee and Game Representative members who have helped put on a wide range of events so far. With streaming and casting our NSE quarter final League of Legends games and completely rebuilding our Discord server we have been finding ways to keep our members engaged.
With this also being BU Esports 10 year anniversary, we took a look through our history with our Hall of Fame channel in the Discord, archiving and celebrating some of our biggest achievements from the past decade.
In the run up to freshers, your society has been running a freshers fair clip competition. What inspired this, what kind of clips did you get and did you have a favourite?
At the beginning of May we held our annual E-Varsity event with Solent University, afterwards, we put together a short video of our best clips from the event. This was a hit amongst the society members and it gave us the idea of creating a server wide montage of the best moments throughout the past couple years. We plan to use this on our freshers fair booth come September as a way to showcase the talent at BU.
We have had clips from a large variety of games, from Counter Strike to Overwatch and even various fighting games. My favourite has got to be this stunning 1v4 from Sacra during a Valorant WNB game that secured us the round win. It was the exact kind of moment I want to highlight more over the next year.
Despite it being summer and a quieter period, you definitely don't seem to have shied away from competition, even running your own Marvel Rivals tournament - would love to hear how that went down!
Inspired by both the tournaments held at NSE and similar events that Warwick University has put on in the past, we wanted to put together an event to build connections between Universities and bring the Marvel Rivals community together. This lead to us putting together the Bournemouth Bash Season 1, a draft tournament featuring 8 teams with students from over 15 universities and a £120 prize pool!
The tournament ran over three days with some intense matches being played. All culminating with the semi finals and finals being streamed to our Twitch channel. It was an amazing experience to see everyone come together for such an event and we’re hoping to do more events like this in the future. And who knows, maybe we'll see a Bournemouth Bash Season 2!
Sounds like it was a great event for all involved! On the social side of things, there's rumours of an esports beach bash coming up. What exactly is this?
We’re looking at taking advantage of the lovely beach we have here at Bournemouth by putting on a social at the beginning of September once students come back from summer break. The idea is to bring members together for a fun day at the beach. This will include activities like Volleyball/Football along with some music and a BBQ. It seems like the perfect way to end the Summer with a bang!
Definitely the perfect way to wrap up summer! Moving into next year, you've been putting in a lot of work to get your society using the esports room. What's the plan going forward for this room and the society?
Our Esports room is an exceptional space, 24 high spec PCs spread across two rooms, all designed to support both playing and streaming games. I’ve been collaborating with university staff to get this space opened up to students to use during our NSE games and to host events with other universities.
Great progress has already been made with Rocket League now installed, with Valorant and League of Legends to follow shortly. Our aim is to get this up and running in time for the NSE Winter split starting in October.
Looking ahead we have a lot of other plans for this space with the ultimate goal of hosting a LAN towards the end of the academic year. Essentially building on what we’ve done with the Bournemouth Bash but in person. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this turns out.
Looking forward to seeing what Bournemouth get up to next year. Time for our Pot Noodle question! Your mascot is the barracuda - if you had to make a Pot Noodle flavour for this little fishy, what would it be?
Bournemouth is quite famous for its quality fish and chips, especially along the coast. I think our little Barracuda friend would enjoy that quite nicely, with a little sachet of tartar sauce to go with it!
