Esports soldier hones skills in gaming realm of Apex Legends

Each member knows their primary objective and has been studying every aspect of it for several months with their team, investing hundreds of hours working through strategies and learning everything they can about their enemies.

Yet, this is not a special operations unit. This is the U.S. Army Esports Apex Legends Team stationed out of Fort Knox, Kentucky, and Sgt. Sebastian “Ruszty” Ochoa, a fire support specialist, is one of the professional gamers on the team.

“Initially, I thought it was an email for a bunch of guys playing games, but it’s very much not that!” Ochoa said. “It is a team and a community of competitive and, honestly, elite level esports athletes that are betting everything, every time they play, and that is the biggest misconception I had.”

Ochoa is a native of Gathersburg, Maryland and enlisted into the Army out of Boca Raton, Florida where he was playing baseball for Florida Atlantic University.

“I joined the Army for a sense of structure and to get a little bit more disciplined with myself, and the Army definitely provided me with that,” Ochoa said.

A few years ago, a mass email went out to the force looking for anyone who was interested in joining the Army’s new esports, or electronic sports, team. They were looking for esports athletes who wanted to compete at high levels, Ochoa said.

“I was incredibly excited because it coincided with the perfect time for me,” Ochoa said. “In more recent years, I just started rekindling that fire (for gaming) and (the email) actually ignited a little bit of a competitive drive in me.”

His friend expressed that he had the potential skill to compete. So, he talked with his wife. They agreed he should reach out through email and join the Army esports team community Discord server, Ochoa said.

For the next six months, he started training in his game of choice, Apex Legends.

Apex Legends, or Apex for short, is a multiplayer, battle royale-style shooter game in which 20 three-person teams collect weapons and battle it out to the last team standing.

“I probably put in about 2,000 hours,” Ochoa said. “I went to physical training like normal and worked my normal hours.”

After work, he would have dinner and spend time with his wife. She would head to bed, then he would get started on his nightly training. Typically, he would put in six to seven hours honing his skills and finding teammates. Then wake up and do it all over again.

Then in November 2021, he submitted his application. He was selected, along with 45 other soldiers for tryouts.

“It was a month-long process of group tryouts,” Ochoa said. “And I was one of four people chosen out of that 45.”

The U.S. Army Esports Team focuses on five games; Apex, Rocket League, Overwatch, Call of Duty and Halo. Normally, there are over a hundred people on the Army’s esports team. These folks are called the at-large team. The at-large pro-gamers train and compete at their home station, on their own time. They also compete on a regular basis to see who will get on the competing teams. Only two of these titles have resident gamers, Apex and Rocket League.

“I know it may sound like a small number,” said Victoria McAdoo, the public affairs specialist for the Army esports teams. “But just because of the level of the competition and the time that goes into training for each of the competitions and each of the titles, they focus on quality and not quantity of the titles.”

E-gaming is highly competitive, and there is such a diverse group of players and titles. We want to be in the top ranks with the rest of the elite, professional esports athletes. Therefore, our in-house esports teams specialize on two titles, McAdoo said.

The few that have demonstrated the proper skill levels to delve into the world’s elite gamers could receive PCS, or permanent change of station, orders.

In February 2022, he was selected for the in-house Apex team along with five other soldiers and received PCS orders.

“First and foremost, I am a soldier. So, I still must stay within Army regulations and standards,” Ochoa said. “Coming from Fort Bragg, I go for a run every morning and do some other sort of workout.”

Every morning the team comes together for a strategy meeting. These strategy meetings can last anywhere from one to four hours depending on what the team is going over.

“We will usually talk about what we did the day prior, strategize on how we are going to play and which characters we are going to use. We will scrub through our game recordings to identify deficiencies and weaknesses. Then we figure out how to improve or better handled these areas,” Ochoa said.

After their strategy meeting, if there is military training that needs done, that becomes the priority. If all military requirements are done, one of three things happen: They work with an at-large coach, conduct Aim training, or open the game and start working through scrimmages.

“Aim training is a program on the computer where you try to hit different targets at different angles,” Ochoa said. “It helps in honing your reflexes, honing your ability to hit targets at an ever-changing pace and in different areas.”

Some of the other aspects they must train on with the game is knowing the inherent abilities of each of the characters, studying the abilities of each of the weapons and understanding how each of the team members prefer to play.

“We have to learn, and we have to know, and it all comes from hours and hours and hours of playing with my specific teammates,” Ochoa said. “Without teamwork, we are not able to be competitive enough to compete with some of these guys that play for a living.”