Dominique Cheese plays Rocket Leagues
Dominique Cheese.
Queensbury High School senior Dominique Cheese has been fielding offers from colleges that want him to bring his gift for video gaming to their campus esports teams next fall. The president of the QHS Esports Club, Cheese wasn’t even planning to attend college, but he reconsidered once the scholarship offers started arriving.
“I played video games a lot since I was young, not always eSports, but just video games in general,” Cheese said. “And then one day, I asked my mom for my birthday, a game called Rocket League. And so she got it for me and so I started playing it from there.”
Cheese said that he would watch the various professional esports players who got paid to play, and that motivated him to start playing too, something he has been doing since he was 14.
Rocket League, his game of choice, is “like car soccer,” he said, where players drive cars around a field and ram giant soccer balls into goals.
Arguably one of the world’s most popular esports titles, Rocket League combines soccer with rocket-propelled cars. Cheese said that he spends about 30 hours each week playing the game, and is in the top 25 high school Rocket League players in the state and the top 1% of Rocket League players in the world.
The esports team at Queensbury High School is a small one, with about four to five students, according to esports advisor Austin Cowper, but the team has participated in a few competitions and tournaments. The students typically compete every Thursday after school, often with students from schools in the area.
“In our leagues, we are currently top 30 in the country. We’re top 12 in the eastern United States, or top three in the state as well,” Cheese said.
Cheese’s enthusiasm for sports helped revive this club at the school. Cowper had been looking to revive the club, and when Cheese expressed interest, it was the final push to make it happen.
While Cheese was initially not planning to attend college, once he realized that Rocket League has a large presence on college campuses, and schools started approaching him with scholarships, he changed his mind.
“I think at this point I’ve talked to 30 colleges, I’d like to say they offer pretty big scholarships, usually around the half range,” he said.
It is the same thing as being a big soccer athlete, Cheese explained. eSports players can get brand deals and sponsorships too.
Currently, he is planning to attend Fisher College in Boston, which has a big Rocket League presence, and is “definitely a eSports motivated college,” he said. He plans to do cyber security as his major.
“Fisher might not be a household name like Harvard or Yale,” Cowper said in a press release, “but… their esports teams are Division I.”
“There’s definitely a lot of opportunity in it that people don’t realize. And I think a lot of people nowadays in school think they might get judged for being interested in something like eSports, but I think it’s important to realize that, like, if you enjoy it, keep at it, and there’s a lot of opportunities in it,” Cheese said.
Some professional gamers are pulling in $100K a year by either competing or by streaming their games online like Cheese’s favorite streamer Jack “ApparentlyJack” Benton, according to a press release from the school. “AppJack” is a 21-year-old British gamer who generated about $140,000 playing Rocket League in 2023.
“There’s always going to be the occasional judgment type of thing from a person, but at the end of the day, it’s, I understand why I do it and why I enjoy it, and it’s not hurting anybody.” Cheese said. “It’s not bad to play games. Put your head down and just kind of push to it.”
Nayanika Guha is a staff writer. Contact her at: 518-742-3272; nguha@poststar.com.
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Dominique Cheese plays Rocket Leagues
Dominique Cheese.
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