I would keep my stat tracker page open on my second monitor, and between games, I would refresh it to see if I made the number change that I wanted to change.

When you're competing at the highest levels of e-sports, you're surrounded by data.

There are the stats you see while you're playing, like your score or your health, but there

are also external websites that track your global rank, basically a public report card that

updates in real time.

These sites can be informative, to be sure, but checking them constantly can create a counterproductive

distraction. It felt like either I was the best in the world or I wasn't worthy of anyone's time

because it was just such a black and white thing of the number goes up, the number goes down.

What it led to is this really heavy comparison of thing of the number goes up, the number goes down. What it led to

is this really heavy comparison of myself to the people that were in that game, random opponents,

random teammates, whatever, and saying, well, I think I'm going to lose this one because their

numbers are better than mine. And I psych myself out right away.

Players can get so fixated on the immediate sting of seeing their ranking drop that they lose their nerve.

Instead of playing to win the match, they start playing a safe game just to keep that one number from budging.

I would focus on one particular number and I would focus on only that much to the degradation of my performance elsewhere.

Cora Kennedy used to play esports competitively.

Now she directs collegiate esports at Illinois Wesleyan University.

And these days, she sees her students falling into the same trap

that used to haunt her, obsessing over minor fluctuations in their rankings instead of focusing

on the big picture. What really gave me pause and helped me reflect on it was shepherding my students

the same struggles I've gone through and trying to steer them away from the challenges that I've dealt with by being so statistically oriented, by being someone who focuses so intently on a stat and it can hurt your teammates, hurt your team performance if you just focus on one little number.

That's why Cora now tells her players to close the stat trackers during a game.

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