UMKC’s premiere esports club, Roonited, is bringing together students to further strengthen relationships between one another by playing video games.
Johnny Dao, a computer science student at UMKC, spends his free time on campus co-running the esports club as the vice president.
Dao had not played very many video games before becoming vice president, until he saw that the university had an esports club.
“My first semester here, I had already quit playing for a while, but I saw that they had a
“Valorant” esports team, and I thought that was really cool,” said Dao.
UMKC added esports as a varsity sport in 2021, but it was later removed from athletics during the summer of 2025.
Jacob Phan, former vice president and now secretary, said it was the former president of the club who decided to leave after being denied a full contract for benefits from the school.
In response, Roonited was formed, a new gaming and esports club that welcomes any and all students.
Roonited utilizes two rooms: the competition room and the common room, both located on the second floor of Flarsheim Hall.
The common room is available to any student who wants to hang out, meet students, do homework or play video games.
“A lot of us don’t actually play in there,” Dao said. “There’s people in there that aren’t even gamers. We need to put up a sign or something that says you can come in anytime as a student, you don’t need to be part of the club.”
On the other hand, the competition room is semi-exclusive to the club, although students who ask nicely can use the room for studying when not in use.
The School of Science and Engineering (SSE) provided the funds for over 15 computers and two rooms for the esports league.
“These computers are running off of 3080s, and I believe it’s 10th-gen i7,” Dao said. “When UMKC disbanded us as an athletic team, we kept the equipment they bought, and that’s what we use.”
Currently, Roonited has teams for games like “Valorant” and “Rocket League,” and they are in the process of forming a team for “League of Legends.”
Roonited is also an active participant in local tournaments, but events are never hosted at UMKC.
“Tournaments are mostly off-campus now, because we just got into a new administration and we’re still trying to figure things out,” Dao said.
