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Assistant Principal Miles Carey oversees a Rocket League
practice at Washington-Liberty
High School in Arlington, Va. Kisha
Ravi/NPR
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NPR Ed
As Esports Take Off, High School Leagues Get In The Game
Aubri Juhasz
January 24, 2020
Nowadays, if you're a teenager who's good at video games there's a lot more to be had than just a pot of virtual gold.
There's college scholarships, tournament money and high salary jobs.
Today, more than 170 colleges and universities participate. And there's
money on the table — more than $16 million in college scholarships.
Naturally, high schools have followed suit.
This year, 17 states and the District of Columbia are offering formal esports teams.
Kids perfect their skills alongside teammates with the help of a high
school coach. They run drills, develop strategy, review game footage
and compete against other teams across their state.
But most high schools don't house their esports teams under athletics.
In Virginia, the league is considered an academic activity.
Scooter Norton is a senior and captain of Washington-Liberty's Rocket
League Team. He and his teammates Calvin Forinash and Matthew Goodwin
have known one another since they were in kindergarten and have been
playing Rocket League together for three years.
"When this opportunity came around, I don't think there was any
hesitation from us about whether we would do it. It was just a matter
of whether our parents would let us," Forinash says.
All three said their parents have at times resisted their desire to play video games.
"My dad really kind of struggles to accept that I want to have this as
an extracurricular activity," Goodwin says. "My mom has been pretty
chill about it, but my dad still has a learning curve."
Goodwin is a dedicated soccer player and will be playing on his college
team next year. He says that when talking to his dad, he tries to
explain how the two activities aren't that different.
"We're playing soccer with cars and it's just on a screen," Goodwin
says. "There isn't a big difference between the two except that one
requires actual physical activity."
In some cases, the decision of high schools to begin offering
competitive esports leagues as a school sponsored extracurricular has
been enough to change parents' minds.
Scooter Norton's mother, Cynthia Perera says that while she and her
husband always supported their children's athletics without question,
esports were a source of conflict.
She pushed to limit Norton's time spent playing — and still monitors it — which led to many fights.
But since the Virginia High School League decided to offer this year's
esports pilot she says her perspective has changed substantially.
"It makes a difference not just for the parents but also for the kids,"
says Perera. "It's something they're aiming for. There's goals here for
school pride."
And Norton says he's noticed a difference too.
"We've taken a different approach now that we are playing in a league,"
says Norton. "We've started actually practicing rather than just
getting on and playing for a couple of hours. We're starting to
implement different types of drills, different things for us to focus
on, that will help us improve as a team faster than just playing the
game would."
Before, says Norton, they were playing to improve, but not with a set
goal in mind. Now, with the league, their practices are more targeted
and their goals are clear.
And despite the pressure of competition and the desire to win, all
three players say their time spent playing Rocket League hasn't
increased since the league started. If anything, they might play
slightly less.
Miles Carey is an assistant principal at Washington-Liberty. He coaches
the school's League of Legends Team and oversees the esports program at
large.
"When the state says this is academically valid and we want to support it, I have to do a lot less explaining," says Carey.
Carey started the school's gaming club three years ago. Since then he's
seen the benefits of allowing students to practice the games they're
already playing in a structured environment.
"If a kid is playing basketball 10 hours a week in the park, why not
give them a structured environment to play it," Carey says. "I think it
is great for kids to take something they are already passionate about,
make it a way to connect with the school and learn more from it."
Carey says when it comes to the benefits of playing esports there's a lot of overlap with traditional sports.
Students learn teamwork and communication. How to handle stress and
overcome failure. They work to balance time spent playing their sport
against other commitments.
Carey says his students are more comfortable with technology. Some of
them have even learned how to build their own computers in pursuit of
having the best gaming machine.
And while the majority of students who play esports at
Washington-Liberty are involved in another school sponsored activity, a
third of them are not.
The success of high school esports is dependent on the accessibility of necessary technology.
PlayVS, which launched in April 2018, provides and manages the
technical platform that allows high schools in the United States to
create esports teams and participate in leagues with neighboring
schools.
It costs $64 per student, per league, per season. Sometimes this fee is
paid by the student's parent or guardian, other times schools have
enough money set aside to cover the cost themselves.
The software allows the teams to battle remotely. In the digital age,
this may seem unsurprising, but in the early 2000s, to compete against
one another, gamers had to physically wire their computers together.
This meant dragging your computer to a local area network, or an LAN.
Today, LANs are still considered the purest form of esports
competition, since players are in the same location, eliminating the
possibility of lag due to distance. But, thanks to new software, like
that provided by PlayVS, high school players can verse opponents from
across the state in real time.
And by partnering with game publishers, PlayVS is able to pull data from matches and track player performance.
These tools are important to coaches, but also to recruiters, looking
to attract talented esports players to top universities and colleges.
"There was an opportunity to actually engage them in a competition
where the incentive could be something that's meaningful to them at
that stage in their life, which a high school championship is within
your state," says PlayVS CEO and founder Delane Parnell.
And while the platform does provide the necessary tools for students to
get recruited by colleges and maybe, one day go pro, Parnell says when
he created PlayVS, he was mostly thinking about the kids that simply
play for fun.
"Less than 1 percent of kids will go pro," Parnell says. "We actually
are focused on making sure that the 99 percent of kids who just care
about video games and want to find community and want to be celebrated
for a talent that they have are actually able to do so."
At Washington-Liberty, Rocket League player Calvin Forinash has a similar mindset.
"I don't think of any of us think that we're gonna go pro and I think
it's good for us to realize that so that we don't accidentally put too
much time into it and not end up getting anything out of it," he says.
"We understand enough about what we can do with this that we are
putting in a relatively healthy amount of time, to the point where we
can still do other stuff, but still enjoy the game as well."
But even if they don't go pro, esports presents other professional opportunities.
Jason Chung, an assistant professor of Esports Management and executive
director of Esports at the University of New Haven's College of
Business, says that as the industry continues to grow there are plenty
of other ways to be involved.
There's esports marketing, business management and game development.
Players need physical therapists, trainers, coaches and team managers.
He says the professionalization of the industry has also helped erode
negative gaming stereotypes. Esports has shown that gaming doesn't have
to be solitary and instead can be incredibly communal.
It has also pushed back against the idea of all gamers as individuals who are physically unfit.
"I think in a certain way there has been some truth to the narrative,
in terms of the stereotypes of gamers, as chugging Mountain Dew and
eating Doritos in a basement. That was a stereotype for a reason," says
Chung.
But, he says that is largely no longer the case.
"I think the thing that's changed now in the professional space is that
they're realizing that just having screen time and training, is not
sufficient," says Chung. "You need to do other things to make the
athletes healthy all around."
While Chung believes that esports belong in high schools, he believes
that politicians and administrators need to take a bigger role to
regulate esports before it gets too big.
"I'd like to see is a little bit more leadership by state and local
actors and hopefully with some federal coordination to really outline
what principles and what sort of values they want to instill [through
esports]," Chung says. "What are some of the physical fitness
requirements you want to actually put in there? Because ultimately,
whether it's a sport or a tech product or whatever it is, if we're
going to have high school age kids play it, you want to have some sort
of healthy mindset in there."
Parnell thinks that PlayVS's partnership with local high schools is a
step in the right direction and helps prevent players from getting
burned out too early or from developing "toxic behavior."
"I think what makes this more sustainable overall is that we're
actually providing a structured environment for kids to play video
games, which they would otherwise do unstructured," Parnell says.
"We've implemented a coach, which is an adult in the room and that is
super important."
This year Virginia is piloting their esports league. If enough students
are interested and funds are available they'll offer it again next
year, if not, then it's game over.
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