Before he can tell parents what an esports education is, Joey Gawrysiak usually has to tell them what it isn’t.
“This is not a degree or a major where we are teaching kids how to be better at playing video games,” says Gawrysiak, a professor and director of sports management at Shenandoah University, “but it’s all so new that I totally understand the confusion.”
Gawrysiak is something of a pied piper for electronic games, serving as a consultant to the industry and talking up the activity on podcasts, in lectures at other schools and even on cruise ships. He’s writing a chapter in the first textbook dedicated to esports.
Set amid the scenic vistas of Winchester farm country, Shenandoah has invested heavily in virtual gaming, with the enthusiastic sports management specialist at the helm. After launching a competitive esports team in 2018, the school last year began offering a Bachelor of Science degree in esports, admitting 21 majors (and 18 minors) into its gaming program. Shenandoah is one of the first American colleges to offer this kind of academic focus on video games.
It’s proven popular. Even with the uncertainty of COVID-19, there will be an influx of esports majors entering the school this academic year. “This fall, we had 57 applicants for the major, and I anticipate that we’ll accept 15 to 18. We had much higher numbers than I anticipated,” Gawrysiak says. “I can’t explain the interest, except to say that the word may be getting around about what we’re trying to do here.”
In 2019 Shenandoah, founded in 1875 as Shenandoah Seminary, transformed part of an old armory on campus into a 1,571-square-foot, state-of-the-art esports center.
The facility features three walls of 12-foot projector screens, a dozen different competitor stations and 70 audience seats. “Most esports facilities are set up like computer labs, but ours is designed for spectators,” he says. Students learn the business of running esports events here and, with its broadcast studio, explore esports’ growing potential as a televised sport. The setup is designed to be mobile, so it can be taken on the road to competitions.
The refurbished armory also serves as a practice space for Shenandoah’s 35-member varsity esports team, which competes with universities across the U.S. The contests are sanctioned by the National Association of Collegiate Esports, which the professor calls “The NCAA of esports.”
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Shenandoah University’s esports arena welcomes college and high school gamers and is mobile.
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Last December, the Shenandoah team traveled to South Korea for a competition — a unique opportunity for American students to experience the games in a land where electronic gaming has long been treated as a bona fide sport.
Esports students, in general, can more easily isolate and interact virtually during the pandemic than those in other fields of study, Gawrysiak adds. Instructors and coaches will follow the school’s “ShenFlex” system this fall, teaching online as well as in person with social distancing.
What kinds of video games are being played and studied? The popular favorites such as Overwatch, Rocket League, League of Legends, Super Smash Brothers and a new addition, Valorant.
“These are common games that people play at home, there’s really no difference,” Gawrysiak says. “They range from first-person shooters to multibattle arenas to fighting games. It’s so broad. And there’s a winner and a loser, just like in a basketball game.”
Esports tournaments are covered and televised by ESPN, and celebrity investors such as rapper Drake, actor Will Smith, basketball legend Michael Jordan and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones have sunk millions into esports. “Professional esports leagues have formed with franchise-based teams in Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia, and right here in our own backyard with an Overwatch professional team in Washington, D.C.,” Gawrysiak says. “It’s exciting to think of the partnerships, the internships and the job opportunities this creates for our students.”
“It’s one of the fastest growing industries in the country.” —Tracy Fitzsimmons, Shenandoah University president
Grant Paranjape, the vice president of esports business for the Washington Justice, which plays in the Overwatch League, the first major global esports league, shares the excitement. “Three or four years ago, you started seeing schools across the nation recognize that esports were getting very popular,” he says. “You started to see Overwatch and other teams get created, but the schools didn’t know how to get involved beyond forming clubs.”
Shenandoah, he says, shifted the focus by deciding to have an academic program in addition to a varsity team. “They’ve become the leader in terms of building out academics around esports.”
Approximately 40 colleges around the world offer academic courses centered around esports, but there’s not one as comprehensive as Shenandoah’s curriculum, which offers three different tracks for students — esports management, coaching and media/communications.
The long-term goal is to become a pipeline for an emerging business that globally has become a $1.1 billion concern with more than 300 million customers. In its annual esports report released in February, analytics provider NewZoo estimated that gaming sponsorship would generate $636.9 million in revenue this year — a 17% increase from last year’s $543.5 million.
“[It’s] one of the fastest growing industries in the country,” says Shenandoah President Tracy Fitzsimmons in a promotional video for the program. “We want our students with an interest in this area to have a leg up, not just to compete but to run these events and do the marketing and communication, and to be the coaches.”
A decade ago, the esports phenomenon was mostly limited to Asia — tournaments have long been popular in South Korea, and China has been sponsoring professional gamers for more than 20 years. America is late to the console. The first dedicated esports arena in the U.S. was launched in 2015 in Santa Ana, California.
Joey Gawrysiak, director of sports management at Shenandoah University, is one of the writers of the first esports textbook.
“No one is doing it at the level we are doing it, yet,” Gawrysiak says, “but it’s coming. I probably talk to three to five schools a week asking me about our program and how we set it up. All of these schools are starting to realize that this is a legitimate area of study that students are interested in and that the industry needs.”
Paranjape says that esports needs more well-trained professionals. “I’m going to need qualified people to help us here in Washington with the Justice,” he says. “That’s why what Shenandoah is doing is so important.”
Gawrysiak compares esports’ current state with what the field of sports management was like in the early 1970s. Back then, there was no one in sports who had a degree or who had studied the business of sport. People scoffed at the idea of studying it.” Fast forward 50 years, and sports management is a well-established field. “Sports is an entertainment business that operates commercially to make money, and that’s what we see esports doing now. It has growing audiences and million-dollar contracts, payouts, and prize money, and so it needs people who are trained to run it like a business.”
“If you go to college and study sports management,” says Shenandoah student Sean Kelly, “you aren’t studying football or baseball, you’re studying marketing, finance and other business aspects to go work for the Nationals or the Yankees or what have you. Same thing here.”
Kelly, 20, a junior from Toms River, New Jersey, is one of the school’s e-game spark plugs. He is working on a double major in business administration and esports management and serves as a recruiter for the program. He’s already helped to start a company, Nostalgia Esports, serving as its editor and marketing director.
To have a career in the games, Shenandoah is the only place to be, he says. “A lot of colleges have teams or clubs, but not many have an actual academic program, and I believe it is the only one that has an academic program, a competitive team and a full-spectrum arena.”
It’s no surprise to Kelly that other schools are starting to follow Shenandoah’s lead – Suffolk’s Camp Community College, for one, is now recruiting players for a new wired-up esports facility – or that enrollment in the program is booming.
“To be able to study something that you are passionate about and love so much, and [to] find out that there are job opportunities and an ability to work in that and enjoy it, I mean, how could you turn that down?”
