'Reuben never misses.' Prep esports teams like California's Quartz Hill are grooming future pros.
LOS ANGELES — To find the most unlikely esports powerhouse in greater Los Angeles, you drive north toward the edge of the county line, where the trappings of urbanity begin to fade away and the arid landscape of the High Desert takes over the view far into the horizon.
Pulling up to Quartz Hill High School on a September afternoon, the scene unfolds like pop culture has always presented the American high school experience to the masses — kids finding their rides in the carpool lane, the football team gathering to practice, marching band members blasting off the cobwebs from their instruments with off-key offerings.
Amid the excitement, it would be easy to miss the quiet extracurricular revolution happening here and at many other schools across the region and the country. At Quartz Hill, you need an administrator in the know to direct you through the school grounds to an old, formerly unused portable classroom that looks no different than the ones adjacent to it. There is no signage that declares, "Quartz Hill esports lab: Home of Continuum, best Rocket League team in California," because the school did not want to make it obvious where to find the tens of thousands of dollars worth of technology equipment it has invested into this fresh frontier of student opportunity and development.
The desert sun is blindingly bright, so entering the lab's dark habitat feels like walking into a black hole. But after your eyes adjust, you can see the room is actually cloaked in color, with state-of-the-art computer gaming screens stretching wall to wall that are powered by transparent operating systems featuring spinning rainbows of neon light.
There's Continuum, three boys sitting in front of a row of computers, wearing their light blue, green and charcoal Quartz Hill esports jerseys, made
