Solomon Bloch can be heard from outside his South Campus apartment screaming at the Nintendo video game “Mario Super Smash Bros.” Bloch, a Syracuse University sophomore, is part of the campus’ gamer community, which may solidify since SU is considering the creation of an esports team.

“To say the school supports us in any way would be the coolest thing,” said Bloch, an applied mathematics major.

SU is trying to capitalize on students like Bloch who are interested in esports, an emerging sport that is centered around multiplayer video game competition.

Esports is paving its way into the collegiate sports landscape, with nearly 40 schools doling out scholarships totaling more than $4 million. The NCAA is not involved, so while some schools have started programs under their athletic departments, others have teams under a specific academic program. SU Athletics doesn’t plan to add esports.

“The focus for Syracuse University athletics is to support the 600 student-athletes on our 20 intercollegiate teams in reaching their full potential,” SU Athletics said in a statement.

The only Power 5 conference school to have a varsity program is the University of Utah, while the Big Ten, another Power 5 conference, maintains a club league run through the Big Ten Network and game publisher Riot Games.

The Big Ten’s esports league has 12 club teams, excluding only two of the conference’s schools — Penn State University and the University of Nebraska. The competition is solely for League of Legends, and each of the six players on the club teams receive a $5,000 scholarship. Some matches air on the Big Ten Network.

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In a sport that is increasingly popular across American colleges, more and more schools are looking to get on board, including SU. Currently without a club or varsity team, the university has created a committee to look at the potential prosperity of the sport. What’s tricky for new programs is that no standard business model to replicate exists because the sport is relatively new. In turn, it presents challenges for schools like SU to find the most effective way to enter the field.

That’s why SU created the committee to start a club team, headed by volunteers Jenny Gluck, associate chief information officer for student services, and Christopher Hanson, assistant professor of English. They say an SU club sport is on the horizon.

Hanson and Bloch met at an SU Gaming Club meeting last year. While there, Bloch was added to a group chat with several other Smash Bros. players. Hanson wants to meet students who play other common esports games, he said, like League of Legends, Dota 2, Rocket League and Super Smash Bros. No club teams exist for any of the games at SU.

SU is open to having a different team for each game, Hanson said, which would broaden the pool of students available. As for now, the closest thing to an organization on campus, the Syracuse Gaming Club, meets Fridays at 5 p.m. in Hinds Hall.

Sean Morrison, a digital media associate for ESPN’s esports website, said since esports is based on video games, there aren’t annual, recurring costs like field maintenance or equipment replacement.

“There’s an initial sunk cost and once you pay that you’re pretty much OK,” Morrison said. “Obviously stuff happens with computers and stuff like that. It’s not nearly as expensive toward the back end as you would expect it to be.”

The NCAA has not yet started its own league, which allows players the opportunity to earn prize money if their school allows. The NCAA board of directors is meeting this week to discuss the possibility of a league with varsity esports teams. Esports communities would oppose NCAA involvement, Morrison said, because of the nature of the sport.

“It has, from the very beginning, been a grassroots thing,” Morrison said.

Work in progress

Scholarships, prize money and “an arena,” which in esports can just be a large room, are all in the conversation for a team, Hanson and Gluck said.

“There is a pretty strong culture of fan support for a number of our teams at SU,” said Hanson, who has been spearheading the effort. “I don’t see any reason why there wouldn’t be the same amount of interest and support in esports teams as well.”

The committee responsible for bringing esports to campus has been meeting with interested students and staff and the vision for a facility, Gluck said, involves “a very large, flexible, modular space that can be reconfigured based on the games being played at that time.”

There would also be be a number of screen displays where people could watch the activities of the game.

Robert Morris University Illinois has varsity esports housed under athletics and configured a room with 35 computers as its arena. An additional 20 computers sit in another room, and the team can host tournaments in those rooms and stream them live. There is another room for live audiences and sometimes the team hosts fans in an auditorium. At the University of California, Irvine, the esports venue has a stage that fits about 10 gamers and seating for spectators.

The group at SU has pinpointed Goldstein Auditorium in the Schine Student Center as an existing location that could suit a team. The 1,500-person venue could handle big and small events, Gluck said. For even larger events, the group said it would consider bringing the technology to a larger venue.

High-level gaming would require sufficient network infrastructure, which is the design of an electronic network and bandwidth, the ability of a system to process information.

“I’d want to beef it up so that it wouldn’t hamper any of the activities going on,” Gluck said.

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Building a new facility on campus would also be considered, Gluck said, focusing near the Schine Student Center or Bird Library.

Esports could open up new opportunities, Gluck said. For example, people with disabilities could be a part of the action, something that may not be possible with traditional sports. One of the world’s best Counter-Strike players, nicknamed “Handi” because he does not have hands, plays with a special keyboard configuration and also uses headbutting as a method of hitting certain keys.

A major or graduate program in computer gaming might be added to complement a team, Hanson said. Currently, the only related offering is a computer gaming minor in the College of Visual and Performing Arts.

The esports landscape

At the SU Gaming Club, people play board and table games as well as video games. Since video games come second to table games at club meetings, club president John Cooper Ryan said people find others who play the same games as them.

“People network at the Gaming Club and it’s like, ‘I play ‘League (of Legends),’ do you play League?’ or something like that,” Ryan said.

Bloch and his Smash Bros. counterparts, who met at the Gaming Club, went on to form an unofficial club for that specific game. Bloch and his fellow team members have traveled locally to play in Smash tournaments coordinated by The Melee Games, he said.

In comparison to “League of Legends,” Bloch said Smash Bros. yields lower prize money because “it’s just not in the public eye.” He does think a Smash Bros. team would be great for the university and could have a great turnout of students to play, and even some to watch. He said he would be thrilled to represent SU if a team was ever created.

“If we could get those backpacks that the athletes wear, that would be the coolest thing,” he said.

Collegiate esports is a fractured landscape, but the majority of teams compete in the National Association of Collegiate Esports, which oversees 45 institutions. There is little regulation for collegiate esports since the NCAA is not a governing body for the sport and its schools.

The league wants to pursue a varsity team at SU and recently sent over “quite a bit of information” about how to create a program, NACE Executive Director Michael Brooks said in an email.

At RMUI, gaming is one of the athletic department’s 25 teams. It is not considered a men’s or women’s team since it is co-ed, which disassociates it from Title IX conflicts. Because esports is not affiliated with NCAA, colleges have the decision to collect all the prize money or give all the winnings to their gamers, like RMUI.

“Some schools are forced to be under athletics to obtain funding,” said Jose Espin, esports coordinator at RMUI. “Some are fortunate enough to be standalone as a club but they have to generate revenue but they get some financial support from the university.”

RMUI offers scholarships ranging from 20 to 70 percent. The school’s reason for giving scholarships is simple: recruitment. To start up the program, the university spent about a quarter of a million dollars.

RMUI follows the belief that all prize payout should be given to the players. The winnings aren’t enormous like professionals, Espin said, as a typical prize pool is around $10,000 then split among team members. The department also covers all expenses on the road because the school’s management sees it as a marketing tool, and “it pays for itself.”

SU would become one of few scholarship-giving esports teams in the Northeast. It would rival Rutgers University, a club that competes in the Big Ten Network’s league.

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Esports can drive admission to new heights, Espin said, and he thinks SU can benefit from it as well. Last year, the Eagles recruited one player from Argentina and now the school is focusing on a gamer from Nepal. The coaching staff looks at Elo rankings, a scoring system derived from chess, that helps the university to target gamers.

RMUI’s announcement of a new team, though, initially caused drama. Critics see esports as not a real sport and a contributing factor to laziness and obesity rates.

“We had crazy emails,” he said. “People saying, ‘You’re a disgrace,’ and, ‘Why is this under athletics?’ Blah, blah, blah. People were really controversial about it. It added to our image. There’s no bad publicity, so that’s the mindset we had.”

Esports can bank on the same revenue streams as traditional sports, Espin said. Food concessions, tournament entry fees and TV deals are all options for future growth.

What’s in store

Currently, 22 percent of male millennials watch esports, according to the market intelligence website Newzoo. This puts esports on par with baseball and hockey in the U.S. Esports now has celebrity gamers like Sang-hyeok Lee of South Korea and Saahil Arora of the U.S. College esports is trying to replicate that, though on a smaller scale.

Capacity crowds have sold out some of the country’s most famous venues, including New York’s Madison Square Garden, Los Angeles’ Staples Center and Seattle’s Key Arena for esports contests. Total esports revenue is expected to at least double by 2020, according to Newzoo.

“There is awareness at a number of different levels across the institution of how quickly the industry of esports is growing and of how many of our students are interested in competitive gaming,” Hanson said.

Esports has formed a home on online streaming platforms like Twitch.com. ESPN has dabbled with esports on television before, Morrison said, but since people typically watch online, it is difficult to transfer online viewers into the realm of appointment television.

“It may not be the same as Michigan-Ohio State in football, but it’s still a lot of fun,” Morrison said. “It’s something people are invested in. I can definitely see the ACC network or SEC network experimenting with it.”

There are school-supported esports student organizations and unofficial esport groups across other ACC schools, but nothing is formally in place to pit conference foes against one another.

“The league is analyzing esports from multiple perspectives to determine the potential to create viable commercial and competitive property,” said Kevin Best, senior associate commissioner for communications at the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Although esports is sprouting up all over the country, there seems to be a notable lack of teams in the Northeast. SU has looked closely at programs around the country, picking up on what each one does best. After waiting patiently for the sport to pan out, SU is ready to capitalize.

“If you look at a company like Apple, they aren’t always the first people to bring something to market,” Hanson said about SU’s perspective on gaming. “They get a chance to see what works and what doesn’t work. And then they bring — what some feel — is the best of whatever it is.”

Published on October 24, 2017 at 11:46 pm

Contact Kenneth: kmintz@syr.edu