Peter the Anteater, the University of California–Irvine official mascot, has a new type of sport to cheer for: esports.
New to campus last fall, UC–Irvine started a varsity program for video gamers, complete with scholarships and an on-campus arena.
“On the competitive side, we offer scholarships to gamers in both ‘League of Legends’ and ‘Overwatch,'” says Mark Deppe, acting director for UC–Irvine’s eSports since July 2016, which marked the beginning of the school’s program.
All team members are offered a scholarship, he says, worth up to half of in-state tuition.
But UC–Irvine isn’t alone in this space. Other colleges and universities over the last year have formalized esports, competitive video gaming, under their athletic departments for specific games, such as “League of Legends” and “Overwatch.” Players for these digital teams, similar to other college athletics, are enticed with scholarships and tuition waivers.
“There’s about $7 million of esports scholarships that are available for students,” says Michael Brooks, executive director of the National Association of College eSports, an organization that governs the sport at the collegiate level. “The amount of scholarships vary from institution to institution right now because best practices and fairness equity hasn’t been established because it’s such a young industry.”
[Explore the ins and outs of getting an athletic scholarship at Division I schools.]
In fact, Brooks says only seven varsity programs at colleges across the U.S. existed when his organization started in July 2016. Today there are 46 varsity programs, he says.
“Our projection by the end this academic year, July 2018, is we expect there to be more than 100 institutions with scholarship programs or building scholarship programs,” Brooks says.
ESport Varsity Teams Started at Private Colleges
While esports has existed for more than 20 years, the sport didn’t make its way onto college campuses until recently. Robert Morris University in Illinois was the first university to offer scholarships and create a varsity team for esports.
“I was playing one of those games — ‘League of Legends’ — at my house, and I had a light bulb moment. Why couldn’t this be a sport at my school?” says Kurt Melcher, who is now the executive director of Esports at Intersport, a Chicago-based electronic sports production company. Melcher previously worked as an athletic administrator at RMU, where he proposed having an eSports collegiate team.
The team started at the beginning of the 2014-15 academic year, and Melcher says the scholarship “was up to 70 percent of tuition, which is similar to what we award basketball, football and soccer.”
Melcher says since RMU’s esports team is part of the athletics department, the program offers students gear, a training facility, travel to games and meals.
[Read about 10 ways to nab a scholarship to pay for college.]
Unlike traditional athletics on college campuses, esports has some major differences. The NCAA doesn’t regulate esports. So at the moment, there are no roster or scholarship caps for teams, experts say.
But eventually, Melcher says the NCAA is probably going to want to be involved at some level — especially as esports grows among colleges and universities.
Now in its fourth year, electronic sports scholarships at RMU range between $3,000 and $13,000, with the average award being $7,500, according to Nancy Donohoe, the school’s spokesperson.
“RMU offers participation and scholarship opportunities to the eSports program for up to 100 participants,” she said in an email.
Private colleges and universities in the Midwest, including the University of Pikesville in Kentucky and the Maryville University of St. Louis, were first to offer scholarships for competitive gaming. Now some larger public universities have also launched esports varsity programs.
“It’s a domino effect; once those larger schools like Utah and UC–Irvine come on board, it’ll be more widely accepted and adopted,” says Melcher. “The Big 10 have some scholarships for ‘League of Legends’ — all schools except Penn and Nebraska.”
[Learn how out-of-state enrollment is rising at state flagship universities.]
Club-level Teams Also Compete for Scholarships
For students who don’t make a varsity esports team, scholarship opportunities are still available.
Typically, colleges and universities that don’t have an official digital team often have an active club on campus with teams that also compete in collegiate tournaments. The University of California–Berkeley is one school with that structure.
“There are individual groups per game run within the club, and they’re all supported with the larger umbrella of the esports club, which has over 1,300 members on Facebook,” says Kevin James Royston, 21, a rising senior who was on the UC–Berkeley team that won an “Overwatch” tournament earlier this year.
The Southern Californian native says he was afraid that he wasn’t going to make the team last fall because “the people were so good” at tryouts.
Royston and his teammates came in first place at a national tournament game in February, and the team won $42,000 to be split seven ways.
The in-state video game champ says, “It covered a whole semester of classes.”
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