Last year, senior Ryne Haas looked around and noticed something missing from the NHS community. And rather than complain, he decided to do something about it. Haas created the eSports team,  a team of students who plays video games competitively.

“The opportunity came about in my sophomore English class,” Haas said. “Mr Cecil gave us the opportunity for our English final to do whatever we wanted, so my friend Mitchell Breier and I created an eSports team. The next year I joined the innovations class and was granted a pretty big amount of money and I let it go from there.”

     The team was started in 2016 when they were granted $30,000 from the school’s library fund, and the are still growing to this day, as they were granted another $35,000 this past winter.

“We currently have partnerships with ‘Twitch’ and ‘Snap! Raise,’” Haas said. “To get sponsors, we find businesses that will support us either socially or financially and we try to work something out with them by using their logo to promote them in return.”

Noblesville’s innovations teacher, Don Wettrick, was on board when Haas gave him the idea of starting an eSports team after learning just how big the eSports field is growing.

“When he showed me how fast it was growing, I really wanted to be apart of it and have the school to be apart of it,” Wettrick said.

As for Haas, he still wants to be involved with eSports industry even after he graduates later this year.

“I hope to see the eSports team spread into other schools around Hamilton County and eventually around the United States,” Haas said. “I plan on attending IU or Butler and running an eSports consulting firm for high schools trying to do what I did for NHS.”

During his freshman year, Haas identified another opportunity to create something new. This time it was in the business world. Haas likes to purchase clothes and resell them on third party websites, which is a common thing nowadays. The clothes can range from Ralph Lauren, to Tommy Hilfiger to anything vintage Haas can find at Goodwill or Salvation Army.

“My freshman year I started to get more into clothes,” Haas said. “I started watching a YouTube channel called Round Two, which is like a buy and sell trade shop and it inspired me to start buying and selling myself.”

Hass will buy the exclusive dropped clothes online before they sell out, and resell them himself.

“I resell the clothes for the people who cannot get it for the retail price anymore,” Haas said. “It depends on the original price, but I usually markup 30%.”

One of Noblesville’s business teachers, Dan Nicholson, says that for any student who is thinking about starting a business or selling things online should learn from others who have done this in the past.

“You don’t have experience, so you have to try and learn from others situations and problems that they’ve encountered,” Nicholson said.

Whether it is creating a team or club through the school, starting your own business or just trying something for the first time, Nicholson says don’t be afraid to take risks.

“I think that sometimes we get scared to try new things because we’re worried that they won’t work, but we don’t know what the outcome will be until we go out there and give it a shot,” Nicholson said.