From participation in youth leagues in elementary school to varsity teams in high school, young athletes dedicate hours of practice to become the best and earn a spot on a college team. Students do not show up untrained and unskilled seeking to become Division I basketball players, and in that vein we need trained cyber athletes.

We must instill the same skill development framework and mentality of athletes in students to foster cybersecurity talent and address the growing cyber skills gap prevalent across industries. In 2016 the average company spent $15 million a year fighting cyber crime, a 20 percent increase over 2015, according to the Ponemon Institute. While costs are rising as threats advance, cybersecurity competitions are fostering the necessary environment for students to think more like athletes and practice skills before entering the job market.

The National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (NCCDC) presented by Raytheon kicks off this week at the California State Polytechnic University Western Regional with eight schools competing for a spot at the national competition in San Antonio on April 22.

I’ve seen firsthand the benefits of these skills-driven, applied competitions. After spending 17 years in security roles at Hughes Aircraft, Apple and California State University, Chico, I felt new hires came out of school with great knowledge, but lacked practical and foundational skills critical to providing value in the first few years as a professional.

I’ve since moved into academia and recognized early on that it’s hard to put real skills into practice with a tightly packed curriculum. But you also can’t learn math without practicing math problems beyond the classroom, so I became an NCCDC coach to help students put cybersecurity theory into practice.

I believe that NCCDC offers an accelerated learning environment that trains students faster than most industry experience and provides the practical foundational skills graduates often lack. Competitions provide an open-ended assessment that measures knowledge and skill development, causing students to perform their best. They also provide the most authentic forum for assessment. The only meaningful assessment in the cybersecurity profession is the success or failure of attacks.

As with any sport, success requires practice. Each year beginning in July, the NCCDC team at Cal Poly practices for six hours on Saturdays, starting with basic skills, such as Linux configuration and rule sets, and progressing to understanding a complete network build and how to defend against particular attacks. Add in homework and the average player spends 15 hours a week, nine months out of the year practicing for the regional competition in March and then the national competition in April if the team advances.

With Stanford, Berkeley and other strong teams participating at the Western Regional this year, we expect the competition to be fierce. And while I want my team to perform well come competition day, I know the payout is in the real world.

The scenarios played out in the competition resemble a real company’s network that the team has to defend by working together to effectively communicate, strategize, exercise specialized skills and allocate the right resources to protect the most vulnerable assets.

As the teams undergo rigorous hits to their organization’s network, the industry professionals participating as the attackers, spectators and sponsors take notice. In the last three years, 14 of the 15 NCCDC competitors at Cal Poly have accepted six-figure starting salaries at leading national tech companies. Cal Poly’s Computer Information Systems graduates earn an average starting salary of $60,000, illustrating that it pays to compete. Companies such as Raytheon, Amazon, Facebook and Workday have been key employers for the talent coming out of these competitions.

There is much to be done to encourage students from a young age, but we are already beginning to see more advanced talent and more rigorous challenges across the regional and national NCCDC competitions as students entering have participated in competitions at the high school level.

Early engagement with young boys and girls will allow students to develop mastery and industry preparedness, helping them to hit the ground running and to provide significant contributions right out of college. Our nation eagerly awaits these cyber athletes who will perform at the highest level and protect our economy from the most advanced threats yet.

Ronald Pike, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of Computer Information Systems at Cal Poly Pomona. He came to academia after 17 years in industry where he focused on network and systems management and cybersecurity.