AURORA — Their voices rise above the sound of furious keyboard strokes and mouse clicks.

In a sport where every second truly matters, and one mistake might lose the game, five players constantly relay information on shared headsets. They’ve practiced three days a week for months inside a dimly lit physics lab at Gateway High School. These athletes are coached, study film, diagram plays, idolize professionals, wear matching orange-and-black uniforms and compete for a Colorado High School Activities Association title.

That’s right. The age of esports — competitive team video gaming — has infiltrated mainstream sports in Colorado with the state’s youngest gamers owning the spotlight.

“When we found out there would be a state championship (this year), I brought them to the gym and showed them the state banners,” said Matt Flori, a Gateway teacher and esports coach. “I told them: ‘This goes down in history. It never goes away.’ They know what’s at stake.”

Esports is a worldwide phenomenon that shows no signs of slowing down.

Industry investing topped $1 billion in 2019, per media reports, with significant buy-in from a long list of sports stars and musicians. Professional esports teams are dotted across the U.S., competing in a range of multiplayer creative problem-solving action games such as League of Legends, Rocket League, Overwatch and Fortnite. Kroenke Sports — which owns the Avs, Nuggets and Rapids locally — owns multiple esports teams in Los Angeles.

Fans fill arenas that seat thousands to watch professional games projected live on giant screens, with an even larger audience tuned into live internet streams. The 2019 League of Legends World Championship was played in sold-out venues across Berlin, Madrid and Paris. It reached 100 million viewers worldwide, rivaling the Super Bowl audience.

The lack of athleticism or physical challenge will make some scoff at esports’ legitimacy, but defining it in archaic terms of “real sport” is beside the point. These gamers, ironically, don’t play around.

“This debate is funny because I hear it all the time,” Broncos long-snapper and esports player Casey Kreiter said. “If anyone doesn’t think being a competitive video gamer is not a sport, I would challenge them to pick up a controller. It’s not easy.”

• • •

Jack Callahan helped to develop the esports Club at CU-Boulder with a group of 20 students during his freshman year. Now, four years later, he’s watched it grow to 1,800 members. CU hosts a dozen events per semester that can draw hundreds of competitors.

Every four-year college in Colorado has some level of organized esports, Callahan said, although it lags behind other states that offer college scholarship dollars for recruited gamers. The University of Utah became the first Power 5 program to provide varsity scholarships for esports in 2017, following the lead of smaller schools such as Maryville (St. Louis), Robert Morris and California-Irvine.

But a lack of scholarship dollars does not seem to impact the Buffaloes. Callahan said CU regularly defeats Utah “across the board” in a sport where elite hand-eye coordination and strategy rule.

“What’s exciting about esports is the passion the players have means they can turn that passion into something that resembles very traditional sports,” Callahan said. “They’re showing up for scrimmages, they’re getting together for (game) reviewing and treating it as an actual sport. You have some of these players who are actually putting in 20 hours a week in this game because they want to represent their school.”

Division-II Colorado College and Western Colorado have founded esports programs led by faculty advisors. WCU even constructed an esports arena in Gunnison to host competitions. More college teams are popping up across the state every semester.

Callahan credits much of that growth to esports hitting the mainstream in 2018 when famed professional gamer Ninja linked up to play Fortnite with rappers Drake and Travis Scott and Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster. Their game doubled the previous online viewership record on Twitch, Amazon’s live-streaming platform, from 388,000 to 630,000.

The audience grew, and so did the money. Last July, 16-year-old Pennsylvania native Kyle Giersdorf won the Fortnite World Cup in New York City and claimed a $3 million grand prize.

“You’re going to have an entire generation that was focused on games and seeing it as an extracurricular activity,” Callahan said. “Parents are excited and supportive of it because they see it as something that actually has traditional benefits, instead of something you’re wasting your time on.”

• • •

Shawn Collins, an Arvada West teacher and esports coach, was the school’s activities director three years ago when a group of students approached him about starting an esports club. It quickly grew into tournament play within the district. Collins even spray-painted makeshift thrift store trophies with gold to award the winner. “They loved it,” he said.

So, Collins followed up by pitching an ambitious plan to CHSAA to create a state-wide esports league through a joint partnership with the company PlayVs — an online platform that allows schools to build and manage teams, create schedules and track statistics. A two-year pilot program was approved to start this school year and 56 teams joined for League of Legends; a five-on-five battle arena game with goals similar to capture the flag.

Collins didn’t have much esports expertise outside of playing games with his son. He relied on his experience in the Army to lead. Arvada West was one of 16 teams to reach the CHSAA playoffs this month and faced Fruita remotely in the opening round. Collins stood quietly behind a row of desktop computers as play began. His team, in matching blue uniforms, barked out instructions with a laser focus on their monitors.

“If we can find that weak link, we need to feast on it hard.”

“They’re coming after me.”

“I can’t do much here!”

Arvada West was toppled in the first match of a best-of-three series. Dejected players removed their headsets, stretched and walked toward the door. Collins requires they make a lap around the school to discuss strategy before returning for the second match. Collins, with a smile, shouted as they turned the down the hall: “Figure it out!”

“What they really lacked was not gameplay knowledge, but things like communication and basic concepts of strategy,” Collins said. “We’re teaching them how to work together and create that team atmosphere.”

• • •

Cherry Creek denied Gateway’s quest for an esports state championship Saturday night with a 2-0 sweep in the title match at the Localhost gaming facility in Lakewood.

Even so, the experience proved more profound than the outcome.

“This is my first time joining an actual team,” said Dinh Pham, a Gateway senior. “We bonded a lot.”

Kevin Tran, a Gateway senior with a Diamond IV ranking (top 3% League of Legends players in North America), said: “Early in the year, we didn’t know each other. We kind of played for the game. But after we played for a couple of months, we knew exactly how to work with each other. Including me, everyone has gotten a lot better from how we started.”

CHSAA commissioner Rhonda Blanford-Green reiterated the esports pilot program is considered a “competitive activity” and not a sport, placing it in the same category as music and speech programs. CHSAA will evaluate esports for accreditation over a two-year period, and should it gain approval through several committees, esports could be offered to all Colorado high school students.

Don’t get it twisted, though. This isn’t simply nerd salvation. The popularization of esports has bridged high school cliques that typically never share the same social space.

Therein lies the true beauty of esports.

“I’ve got kids on my teams who are marching band kids, wrestlers, varsity-level baseball players and kids who don’t do anything else,” said Collins at Arvada West. “Nothing is cooler than to watch two of them walk together down the hall, give each other high fives — and they had never talked to each other before a day in their lives because they had nothing in common. Now, they have this community together they can belong to.

“It was super powerful.”