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As kids, we are all drawn to something we latch onto for the rest of our lives. For some, that something has to do with music, for others storytelling. However, some are lucky enough to be drawn to a franchise that combines both of these things: Pokémon.

As a freshman, foreign language major Michael Young-Bolton found the lack of representation for Pokémon lovers at WSU confusing. While there were clubs for fans of nearly everything else, Pokémon did not have its own club.

“I noticed there wasn’t a Pokémon club at all, even though I knew there was a huge fan base for it,” Young-Bolton said. “It was really odd to me that there wasn’t a Pokémon club, but there was an anime club and a club for nearly any topic you could think of.”

After waiting a year, Young-Bolton started the WSU Pokémon Club this January. Since its official establishment last month, the club has met three times. Their third meeting, held on Monday, was the first tournament of many the club will hold regularly.

“The point of this tournament [was] to make a Pokémon league for WSU,” Young-Bolton said. “This tournament decides who is the WSU champion, and who the Elite Four will be.”

While the tournament was important to the formation of a league, the whole point of these tournaments is to have fun and challenge each other.

“I think my favorite thing about the tournaments is seeing who is the best amongst us,” Young-Bolton said. “Pokémon is such a variable-based game that even the most experienced player can be underhanded. You never know who’s going to win, that’s why it’s so exciting. I can’t wait to see who becomes champion.”

The Pokémon Club aims to be a place where people can come together, make friends and have a good time, Young-Bolton said. Other officers of the club, such as junior computer science major Nikita Fischer, agree that it’s a great way to get to know people who share interests.

“When you battle someone in Pokémon, you start to learn about them through their strategies,” Fischer said. “Doing tournaments is really fun because you get to know everyone in a different way.”

After the Pokémon Go group disbanded, Young-Bolton decided to take on the responsibility of putting together a committee to take on that role. Depending on interest, this committee plans to go on excursions to hunt Pokémon around campus and surrounding Pullman.

The Pokémon Club meets on Mondays for games, tournaments and, in the future, Pokémon Go. To be a club member, it is a requirement to attend one meeting a month, to accommodate for students’ busy schedules, Young-Bolton said. The club has no member fee.

“Pokémon has lots of different messages in regards to life, like how you should treat other people, how you should treat the earth,” Fischer said. “I think it had such a big impact on our generation growing up because it covered so many important topics that had something to do with the lives we were living.”