AN NCAA FOR ESPORTS?
Rivals nationwide angle to govern video-gaming competition on college campuses
ZYNAB Makki, a junior at Champlain College in Burlington, Vt., had driven 90 minutes from her home for the chance to meet Tyler Schrodt, the young founder and chief executive of the Electronic Gaming Federation.
Since he started the EGF out of his dorm room four years ago, Schrodt has branded himself as the one-stop guru for college students hoping to coax their overflowing video-game clubs from the fringes of university life toward a more mainstream existence. He presents his gaming federation as part mentor and part support system — “the Swiss Army knife for esports on campus.”
His true goal, though, and that of several other organizations jockeying for leadership roles in the growing but haphazardly governed world of college gaming, is bigger: to organize a sort of NCAA for esports.
That grand ambition means not only regular meetings with skeptical university officials but also sit-downs with students like Makki, who runs a club that hopes to persuade Champlain to grant it varsity status. She arrived at Schrodt’s office over the summer armed with questions about sponsorships, scholarships and strategy.
“Any major challenges we can help you out with right now?” Schrodt said.
“I want to do a retreat,” Makki said. Schrodt chuckled. He paused, thinking of hardcore competitive gamers enduring trust falls and icebreaker activities, and then issued his standard reply.
“Yes,” he said. “We can help with that.”
Right now, there is no NCAA for esports, even though competitive gaming is expanding quickly on college campuses. Last year, 40 colleges — a group that includes universities large (Utah) and small (DigiPen Institute of Technology) — established “varsity” esports programs, meaning they hired a full-time coach and staff members, designated an official arena, began recruiting prospective players and even awarded esports scholarships. To these universities, esports programs are as legitimate as the football team. Robert Morris University Illinois, for one, provides updates about its esports teams on its official athletic website.
While no school in Texas yet offers an eSports scholarship, the eSports organization at University of Houston had 295 students on its roster last semester, according to an online report at NewsFix.
But as colleges and even power conferences like the Big Ten and the Pac-12 soften their stances toward accepting esports into a once-exclusive athletic fraternity, the primary organizing body for collegiate sports, the NCAA, has lagged behind. It has yet to rule whether esports properly fits within its obdurate (some might say antiquated) framework for amateurism, equal opportunity and fair play, or if esports should even qualify as a sport.
For now, an NCAA spokesman said only that the organization had held discussions on esports, and planned to have more.
In the meantime, opportunistic grass-roots groups are racing to fill the void. One, the National Association of Collegiate Esports, began last summer as a membership consortium for six varsity programs to organize and establish ground rules. In a year, it has ballooned to 42 members, said Michael Brooks, a former NAIA administrator who joined the NACE as its first executive director.
Schrodt’s Electronic Gaming Federation has focused on corralling the less official club programs around the country in the hopes that when they one day gain varsity status, their colleges will affiliate with his effort. Nearly 70 programs orbit around Schrodt’s organizational vision, including those at Georgia Tech, University of Texas, Harvard and Columbia.
His plan, sooner rather than later, is to introduce a national tournament, something like a March Madness for esports, replete with sponsors, television airtime and crowded arenas. It all sounds like the well-trod NCAA formula, just without the organization itself. And if the trend continues, some warn, it might be too late for the NCAA to get in the game.
“I generally believe they’ll get beaten to the punch,” said Kevin Knocke, vice president at ReKT Global, an esports infrastructure services company. “I think there’s a real possibility of the NCAA missing the boat here.”
THE ANTI-NCAA
Schrodt is 25, with blue eyes, blond hair combed into an impressive faux hawk, barbell earrings and a scruffy beard.
If the picture sounds antithetical to the bureaucratic images of the NCAA, it is intended as such. Schrodt’s vibe and his vision are primarily aimed at aligning with, and looking out for, students’ interests. His company hopes to propel the momentum of popular studentrun esports clubs to the point that their colleges have to pay attention.
Competitive gaming on college campuses is not new. For years, companies like the Collegiate Starleague and TESPA — originally the Texas Esports Association — catered to selforganized groups as online hubs to compete in tournaments with other like-minded groups, or even seasonlong competitions. “We just wanted to create some sort of community on campus where gamers could get together and compete,” TESPA cofounder Adam Rosen said. But over time, “these events grew and grew.”
As the events became more professionalized, drawing crowds and significant prize money, university administrations began taking the players and the teams that participated more seriously. That changed the tenor of college esports, but the framework to support a nationwide network had not arrived yet.
“There was just a lot of confusion about when leagues were starting, when competitions were going to take place,” said Bryan L. Curtis, an assistant athletic director at Columbia College of Missouri, one of the five founding members of the NACE.
Chris Allison, the coach of the esports team at Southwest Baptist University in Missouri, said there were times when he would spend days organizing a match, only to be undercut when the opposing team failed to show.
“That was truly frustrating,” he said. “A governing body really helps to provide some stability, so at least when you prepare for a match, that match is going to happen.”
But any governing body would be confronted immediately by a multitude of other considerations, including sponsorship, recruiting and eligibility issues, and also liability and licensing, since the individual
games are owned by corporations like Riot Games (League of Legends) and Activision Blizzard (Hearthstone, Overwatch).
Notwithstanding their more sedentary nature, gaming programs shared enough commonalities with traditional sports that administrators began treating them like other athletic teams, with coaches, managers, uniforms, round-robin competitions and even cheerleaders. Colleges recruit by “position” — if there is a need, say, for a skilled mid laner for League of Legends. The only thing missing was a league to get everyone on the same page.
That is the opening that Schrodt, who was a competitive gamer in high school, has tried to fill. But when he founded EGF in 2013 as a sort of class project at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Schrodt and his partner, Rockie Hunter, struggled at first to explain their vision to bewildered administrators not well-versed in the intricacies of gaming.
“We thought, ‘Oh, what if we made it like true competitive sports?’” Hunter said. “One of our advisers was like, ‘So kind of like the NCAA?’ We were like, ‘That makes it so much easier.’”
The administrators are starting to come around. After all, Schrodt said these students might not care about their college football team, but they still might want to feel school pride.
Allison, the Southwest Baptist coach, said his 1-yearold program’s biggest need is recruitment, so the NACE and the EGF are working on ways to streamline the pipeline flowing from high schools to colleges and, eventually, to the pros.
It is not unlike what the NCAA does in any number of other sports. But despite a century of history to study, it is not easy.
A GENTLER GUIDING HAND
In certain respects, trying to organize esports can feel a bit like trying to establish law and order in the Wild West. The levels — high school, college and pro — are nebulous and chaotic, with college players earning money, high school players jumping to pro status, and pro players retiring early and returning to college.
Esports also has no universally accepted place on campus, forcing programs to seek support wherever they can find it. Some institutions run esports teams out of the athletic department, as at Columbia College. Others place esports under the department of student affairs, as at Illinois Wesleyan University. At the University of Utah, the first varsity esports program at a so-called Power Five conference sprang from the university’s entertainment arts and engineering program.
Besides the logistical challenge of balancing such an array of programs on the same level playing field, the NCAA has been eyeing competitive gaming warily, even as it recognizes activities like riflery, bowling and equestrian. When asked to comment on the organization’s stance toward esports, and whether it was considering future involvement, an NCAA spokesman said the ruling board of governors had discussed the esports landscape at its August meeting and would most likely continue the conversation in the fall.
But the NCAA has begun quietly sending out feelers. It recently issued a request for proposal seeking a consultant to help research and potentially determine a course of action for college esports, according to three people who requested anonymity before the finalists were chosen by the end of October.
There is plenty about the way college esports is constituted now that would appear to conflict with the NCAA’s policies, not least its regulations regarding amateurism. College players earning money for participation in tournaments — some award as much as $30,000 — would be in violation of NCAA rules. (There is also a Title IX component, Brooks said; more than 90 percent of varsity esports players are men, though most programs are considered coed). And in the culture of esports, personal branding is vital on streaming networks like Twitch, which attracts 10 million daily users, according to a network spokesman. But the NCAA recently declared ineligible a kicker from the University of Central Florida whose selfpromotional videos on YouTube earned him a large following and modest advertising revenue.
“I would say more likely than not, students and administrators do not want this kind of box being put around them,” Mark Candella, Twitch’s director of strategic partnerships, said of the possibility of falling under strict NCAA rules.
This is where competing groups like TESPA, the NACE and the EGF see their opening: by providing tailor-made governance to an audience that they contend they understand better than the NCAA does.
“It’s clear to everyone that probably the NCAA model isn’t quite one that you can cut and paste over on this,” said A.J. Dimick, the director of operations for the esports program at Utah.