eSports in Times of Pandemic

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College campuses closed, but competitive gaming is holding the fort for varsity sports.

eSports in Times of Pandemic
Photograph: Istock/CentralITAlliance.
Reading time 3 minutes
Reading Time: 3 minutes

eSports will become a key tool in the continuing enrollment of students into higher education institutions and participation in college sports programs.

In the last five years or so, eSports have had explosive growth and have become anchor sports through which colleges and universities ensure enrollment and new talent.

However, this growth has become even more exponential during the extended contingency we are currently experiencing due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Around the world, thousands of college sports programs have closed, as well as school leagues, but eSports remain active. The ability of eAthletes to practice their disciplines in their full form online makes eSports the only sports program that does not suffer due to social estrangement measures.

According to the National Association of Collegiate eSports, more than 170 universities have college programs that offer approximately $16 million a year in scholarships. Just in March, the audience of Twitch, one of the most widely used platforms to project eSports competitions, had a 23% increase, which translates into 1.2 billion hours of watched videos.

“A number of them have started independent competitions just to keep their skills up because we know this is going to come to an end someday and we’re going to get back into the classroom, back into the arena,” says Toby Ebel, eSports coach at Baker University in Baldwin City, Kansas. Ebel describes the agenda of many competitive eSports teams at colleges and universities and the team members who train them during the lockdown.

“There is a direct correlation between having an esports program and students wanting to come to your school.”

Moreover, Ebel says there’s been not only a critical increase in the number of people who have turned to eSports consumption but also that college eAthletes are more active than ever due to the need to create more content for competitions and stay on the top of their game. The coach added that a good number of eAthletes went home to different parts of the country, but they kept working as if they were a unit and were sitting side by side. Many college teams in the discipline have this feeling.

Ebel further commented that the idea of keeping college eSports active was not only to ensure that competitors were ready for when the arenas would reopen but also produce content that would offer viewers a notion that sports are still happening, even if they cannot be face-to-face.

eSports and enrollment post-Covid19

The number of college admissions globally has been affected by the pandemic, especially in the area of sports talent acquisitions. It is here where eSports could become key. Joe McAlister, an expert in learning environments, commented for Edtech his perspective on the growing surge of eSports programs at universities.

“There is a direct correlation between having an esports program and students wanting to come to your school,” said McAllister, whose work in helping to create learning environments has been entirely directed toward creating training spaces and eSports arenas for competitions.

A.J. Dimick, Director of eSports at the University of Utah, explains why there is a symbiotic relationship between this sports discipline and enrollment. According to Dimick, the reason why universities are motivated to get involved in creating programs for eAthletes is that it attracts just the profile of students they want, mostly composed of international students from STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), with high averages, many of them engineers.

There is no global consensus on the date of campus openings. Some universities have projected opening in the fall with precautionary measures. Others evaluate the possibility of migrating entire programs in higher education to an online modality. Regardless of the paths that colleges and universities take, one thing is certain: eSports will be an invaluable talent recruitment tool, a key activity to maintain the sense of community and morale among students, and a source of entertainment content for all sports fans who are still waiting for the return of their leagues.

Sofía García-Bullé

This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0