Clintondale grad earns scholarship for Smash Bros.

CLINTON TOWNSHIP — Damitre Johnson started playing a video game because of the characters in it. This fall, Johnson will be going to college because of it.

Johnson, a recent graduate of Clintondale High School, turned his enjoyment of the Nintendo Switch fighting game “Super Smash Bros. Ultimate” into an esports scholarship to Concordia University Ann Arbor.

“I’m really excited,” Johnson said. “I can’t wait.”

Johnson began playing “Smash” games around 2018 by playing the game and enjoying it, especially its wide cast of playable characters. The format involves pitting characters from different video game and media properties against each other in martial arts-style battles carried out in a cartoonish style.

“Over the years, they started adding characters from different games,” Johnson said. “As they did that, I started recognizing those characters from their original games, and that’s what made me stick with it.”

Johnson primarily plays Steve from “Minecraft,” but is also capable of playing Sora from “Kingdom Hearts” and Joker from “Persona,” if needed.

Johnson began playing “Smash” in a competitive capacity in 2021 through the game’s online multiplayer mode, but his road to a “Smash” scholarship did not begin until a friend got involved.

“In 2021, one of our ‘SMITE’ players, Frank Oatis, came up to me and said, ‘Mr. Loh, I know we don’t have a ‘Smash Bros.’ team but I know this kid at the high school who is really, really, really good at this game,” said Clinton Loh, site coordinator for Wayne State University’s C2 Pipeline program at Clintondale High School and coach of the program’s Clintondale esports team.

Johnson competed with Oatis on the high school and local event circuit, competing against other Michigan students and players not affiliated academically. Due to the way “Smash” works, the team was regularly at a disadvantage due to only having two players in a competitive format where teams are supposed to consist of three. Each player has three “stocks” or lives, meaning the Clintondale duo was at risk of losing sooner and had to fight harder with the limited stocks they had.

Things only got more difficult when, on the eve of the Michigan High School Esports Federation, or MiHSEF, Fall 2022 playoffs — coming in as the 23rd-seeded team in a field of 24 — Oatis was unable to compete due to a health issue.

“I was two seconds away from just conceding,” Loh said.

Loh was able to find a non-Clintondale ringer to fill Oatis spot, an exception by MiHSEF standards granted solely because neither high schooler could build a team of their peers. But the outside hands were not as competitive against the MiHSEF players, and Johnson would essentially be taking on some of the best high school “Smash” players in Michigan alone — a single player taking on whole three-player teams.

The Clintondale camp hoped Johnson would hold his own in the first round against the 10th seed Divine Child red team. Johnson took any doubts and made a mockery of them.

“We beat the first team; it wasn’t even close,” Loh said. “We kept on winning.”

Johnson’s semi-alone charge through the MiHSEF took him up to the quarterfinal round where he fell to the No. 2 seed, the Pinckney High School red team, after claiming Perry High School in the second round.

“(Johnson’s success is) amazing to me because it is almost like he’s a generational talent,” Loh said.

The performance at the MiHSEF finals got Johnson on the radar of Zach Yoder, Concordia’s program assistant varsity esports coach, who wanted to see him at a tournament for singles competitors at Divine Child High School in March 2023. Johnson finished in second place.

“First and foremost, he is a very stoic young man,” Yoder said. “He is very polite; he holds himself very well. Damitre, to put it bluntly, was a massive step above pretty much everyone else there.

“He was the shining star of that entire playoffs,” Yoder said. “From a talent perspective, you’re not going to find anyone else in the state of Michigan like Damitre, but we don’t want to bring in someone who wouldn’t be the right culture fit. Damitre, he’s as awesome of a young man as you can find.”

As part of his scholarship, Johnson will play “Smash Bros.” for Concordia starting this fall with matches broadcast on live streaming website Twitch.tv. As for how the collegiate “Smash” scene will look, Johnson seems less worried about his competitors and more about the distance between events.

“The state stuff is going to be a lot farther than what I usually go to,” Johnson said. “Some of the things I go to right now are just an hour drive away.”

According to a statement from Clintondale Community Schools, Johnson is studying accounting with the goal of having a career in finance.