Quincy Sablan’s love for video games and competitive nature made joining his school’s esports team a no-brainer — but beyond a community of fellow gamers and friends, he said participating in esports helped him to learn more about job prospects and opportunities in technology.

Sablan, a Farrington High School sophomore, was one of 70 competitors at Farrington’s Super Smash Classic 4 event Saturday — the fourth esports tournament the school has hosted this year. The event, which was open to the public to enter, took place in the school’s library, where 13 stations were set up for the bracket-­style competition.

“It’s a tournament to gather a lot of students together,” said Joshua Dimaya, a computer science teacher and director of esports at Farrington. “It’s kind of a safe space for them to play, but it really is to kind of show them some of the opportunities that they have in terms of industry.”

The link between gaming and professional opportunities has been the aim of Farrington’s esports program since its inception two years ago.

“Our vision of esports, really the foundational point, was academics,” Farrington community liaison Harris Nakamoto said. “It wasn’t just gaming, but it was really an academic component.”

As esports has grown at Farrington, Nakamoto said, companies like Domino’s Hawaii have “really supported bringing esports to fruition.”

“What we’re doing now with esports is we’re creating a partnership with various companies to support us, but also at the same time, bringing in employers and then layering in the academic components,” Nakamoto said. “We’re having this community come together to create a much more vibrant type of school environment.”

A recent goodwill trip by members of the Honolulu City Council to Seoul sparked further interest in esports, as well as fostered a partnership between Farrington and the University of Utah, Asia Campus, or UAC, which sponsored Saturday’s tournament.

“If there is a way that we can make that connection, start that partnership and bring Korea to Kalihi, and Kalihi to Korea and to the world, that would be an amazing feat,” Honolulu City Council member Radiant Cordero said at the beginning of the tournament. “I’m really excited because esports is more than just a hobby. It’s something that we see worldwide, and it’s something that I really want to see proliferated as huge careers here in Hawaii as well, and I see this as you leading it for our state.”

Cordero said that when she visited UAC on the mid-October Korea trip, seeing the opportunities for studying video games at the university “resonated with her.”

“Farrington High School is in my district, and I knew of them starting up their esports organization,” she said. “There’s not a lot of examples (of careers) that we can utilize right here in Hawaii, so when I saw the campus, it really set the students up for success for creative independent thinking relating to esports.”

After the trip, Cordero connected Nakamoto with UAC assistant director of admissions Ben Voegele to work on spreading awareness of international post-high school opportunities to work in and study esports.

“It’s just bridging that gap, not just with Farrington High School, but the community in general,” Voegele said. “We want to open up that bridge.”

Voegele said gaming students at UAC study a variety of aspects of the industry, including game development, programming, coding and promotion.

“There’s so much more than just sitting around playing games,” Voegele said. “Once you understand it, it’s amazing what they can do.”

In addition to the multiple esports tournaments Farrington hosts each year, Dimaya said Farrington’s esports team — between 50 and 60 students with various interests ranging from engineering, business and creative arts — has also taken multiple field trips to various information technology companies and to local universities, in the hopes that students will learn about the professional opportunities their gaming hobby can lead to.

“We want to open it up to the kids that there’s opportunities for working, and it’s not necessarily only in gaming,” Dimaya said. “They can take advantage of their design skills, and for me as a computer science teacher, their tech skills. We’ve had a few visits to companies that show them that their tech skills are actually very useful.”

Farrington sophomore Sablan said the hands-on trips were “really informative.”

“Just yesterday, we went on a field trip. We visited a couple IT companies, so we learned about the industry and the different jobs in the industry and the steps to get to the jobs,” Sablan said. “I think it really expanded what my job view was, because I was really focused on jobs in the gaming industry. It really broadened my view of the different IT jobs.”