In October 2024, the leads from OU and OCU’s R6 Teams came together and asked administration on both sides if they could host a tournament. The answer was a unanimous, “ABSOLUTELY!” Immediately we collectively got to work and found which team alignments we shared between the two universities. We then secured the venue, resources, and started building our communications, marketing, and logistics to execute. This event does have an extremely quick launch time and is why we decided to keep this as purely an exhibition style event and started establishing the standards for future installments of this event.
“My hope is that this event will be the spark that will ignite a tradition that will last for decades. A way to build up a community and form a friendly rivalry between two universities while creating a chance for team improvement alongside individual growth.”, said Landon “Rush” Schmidt, Captain of OCU Rainbow Six
Because both schools share partnership with McDonald’s of The Southern Plains, we approached McDonald’s to come in and support which also resulted in The Ronald McDonald House of Oklahoma City as the supported charity. For year one this exhibition will host an publicly available event to attend on top of live streaming it from the venue for all supporters. While this event is only half a day long, future iterations will be less about exhibition and more about a pride fight for the region while keeping a philanthropic call to action. Additionally, the goal will be to scale the event up to multi-day and more regional universities.”
“This event means a lot to me as the match that sparked the flame that will hopefully continue to grow in the future. As a student/captain for my team, I can only thank the directors from OU/OCU so much for helping bring my idea to life. Also, as the years go by, I hope to see this event continue to expand to include other nearby schools, and more developments involved as well. Of course, this event would have never been possible without Rush, the captain of OCU R6. We came up with the idea of this event together, after essentially having a trial LAN where our R6 teams competed against each other in the OU venue. Now, this idea has spurred into a full LAN event, with production, support from administration, multiple developments involved, etc… I am very excited for the first year of this event, and hope there are many more to come.” – Kenny “Blizzy” Bartel, OU R6 Captain
