Texas A&M competitive gaming club strives to impress school officials.
Scholarship program sought as gamers head to collegiate championships
The chance to join one of the nation’s best teams in college athletics persuaded Youssef Elmasry, an Egyptian student finishing his undergraduate studies at Iowa State, to enroll for his graduate degree at Texas A&M in January.
He had never heard of the “12th Man.” Baseball and basketball were as foreign to him as the state of Texas. None of the nonrevenue scholarship sports drew his interest.
Elmasry, 21, became an Aggie because of the esports club.
For the last four years, A&M has fielded some of the country’s quickest mouse clickers and keyboard tappers in collegiate esports, a faction in the rapidly popular world of competitive video gaming.
By beating out 31 schools in a regional tournament this spring, the Aggies won $56,000 toward players’ tuitions and advanced to an eight-team championship competition hosted by Riot Games in Los Angeles beginning Thursday. They will square off against Carnegie Mellon in League of Legends (LoL), an online game played worldwide by 100 million people monthly. In it, fantastical characters battle in a lethal variation of capture the flag.
The opportunity to compete for gaming glory before hundreds of spectators in an arena on Thursday seems surreal to Elmasry.
“I never imagined it,” he said. “I still haven’t processed it.”
Nor have a vast majority of U.S. colleges. Despite the success of A&M’s LoL team, it has struggled to persuade its school to follow the trend of prioritizing gaming like a traditional sport. By the start of the fall semester, 26 colleges will be implementing scholarships for esports (electronic sports) teams.
A&M gamers have failed in their attempts to get recognized by the school. According to Jonathan Hsia, the club’s general manager before graduating in engineering this year, the team asked a student organizations secretary how it could raise its profile on campus.
“A&M was not interested at all,” Hsia said.
In 2015, Hsia wanted Aggies fans to know they could watch an online stream of a matchup against the University of British Columbia, a powerhouse program in North America. He messaged A&M’s Twitter account, hoping it would promote a link, but that was moot.
“The person running it had no idea what we were talking about,” he said.
The UBC matchups garnered more than 100,000 viewers. It is unclear how many were Aggies. Tough sell
Dayvion Adams, a junior etymology student who heads A&M’s gaming clubs on campus, wrote to A&M president Michael K. Young. One of Young’s staffers directed Adams to the financial aid office.
“That’s not really what we need,” Adams said.
The team has felt discouraged by the school.
“They don’t care,” said Joey Bowers, a psychology senior from The Woodlands, “but I think it’s more like they don’t get it.”
Plummeting television viewership is coinciding with surging online gaming, projected to make nearly $700 million in revenue in 2017 and $1.48 billion by 2020, according to the market researcher Newzoo. Professional esports teams are worth millions of dollars thanks to sponsors like Microsoft and Sony. Last year’s pro championship — at which teams sat at banks of computers, with their matchups airing on a giant screen before nearly 20,000 fans inside L.A.’s Staples Center — attracted 43 million unique views online.
At the college level, nearly 30 schools, including some in Division III, have offered scholarships and outfitted an on-campus facility, which covers basic expenses in the relatively affordable sport and helps recruit esports’ most talented student players.
But like multiplying minnows concealed beneath the ocean’s surface, the increasing number of scholarship gaming programs still gets overlooked.
Upon several requests to speak with a member of the A&M athletics department, multiple university representatives were at a loss as to who was fit to speak about esports.
“At this time we are not planning to add any additional sports to our intercollegiate athletics department, but we will continue to monitor trends in collegiate athletics,” A&M wrote in a statement. As an example, the school listed its equestrian program, which began in 2012 and won a national championship last month.
A comparison between equestrian and esports is not apt, but the gaming community is used to responses like that.
“On most campuses, there is no relationship between a huge presence of gaming … and interest in gaming by college administrations,” said A.J. Dimick, the director of operations for Utah’s esports program. “It doesn’t show up on their radar because of the differences in how this media (are) consumed by its audience. But that doesn’t change that college esports is absolutely inevitable and schools should get involved.”
Quipped Dimick: “How many A&M students know they won the national collegiate equestrian championship? I missed that on ‘SportsCenter.’ ” Team concepts apply
Aside from the burgeoning industry — revenue from video games reached $75 billion last year, double the international sales from movie tickets, according to the auditing and consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP — schools are realizing that esports teams boast the same principles, like character building and team commitment, espoused in traditional athletics. Utah broke ground this year as the first university in the Power Five college football conferences to start a varsity esports program. Its students will have to maintain a 2.7 grade point average. Dimick said one of the current teams averages a 3.6 GPA.
The teams also are diverse. A&M has brought together an Egyptian graduate student, a freshman from Sugar Land and a junior from Korea. Elmasry had less than a month to find a place to live. The day after he got accepted to A&M, he introduced himself online to the esports members and arranged to move in to the de facto gaming house, located in an off-campus subdivision.
“I really can’t imagine going to college without League,” he said.
In College Station’s gaming circle, Elmasry and Bowers are to esports what Myles Garrett is to football. A high school senior reached out to Bowers online like a fanboy.
“He wants to go to A&M now,” Bowers said.
Gaming proponents say the lack of awareness at most schools and the stereotype that gamers are lazy basement hermits keep administrators from hooking a critical demographic: science, technology, engineering and mathematics students.
Promoting gaming at A&M is “a no-brainer,” according to Kurt Melcher, an associate athletic director and esports coordinator at Robert Morris University Illinois.
Melcher, 47, started the Robert Morris program in 2014 after he coached the women’s soccer team for 20 years. He admired the skill displayed by elite LoL players, who coordinate teamwork, make split-second decisions, and react to immeasurable machinations of outcomes throughout a match. Video visionary
“Why couldn’t we just go get the best players, build a team, build a program and then build an arena?” he thought.
Getting money and confidence from the 5,300-student liberal arts college turned out to be easy. Melcher put together two pages of bullet points about inspiring school pride for “an underserviced” group of students. He won over then-president Michael Viollt, a man in his 60s, when he pulled up a professional LoL match on an iPad. The viewing experience resembled watching a football game.
“He could see a professional broadcast and see the energy in the stands,” Melcher said.
He received $120,000, part of which was used to design a classroom, used exclusively for gaming, on the third floor of the eightfloor school.
“We can’t just put them into a computer lab, because it won’t feel authentic … like something that would validate what they’re good at,” he said.
Melcher estimated the program has been onefifth the cost to operate as the women’s soccer team.
“There’s such a low barrier to entry,” Dimick said. “In this next seven to 10 years, this is a very visible part of the collegiate experience everywhere.”
Said Melcher: “It’s just a matter of: Are you in early, or are you in late?”
Gamers often need crusaders, like Dimick or Melcher, to straighten out the skepticism. With its president’s office and athletics department aloof, the A&M team appears to have gotten lucky. Michael Leary, assistant director of information technology at the civil engineering college, reached out to the gamers after reading an article about a burgeoning team at UC Irvine.
After impressing M. Katherine Banks, the engineering dean, with a report, Leary, 42, has spent the last year researching plans for an A&M program.
“My goal is to make it happen within the next two or three years,” he said.
Leary spent 20 years in IT. He grew up playing video games. He sees what the university is missing.
“The more interesting conversation,” he said, “is athletic conferences would realize they are losing money and they are going to have to compete with an industry that they don’t understand.”