IRVINE – UC Irvine is moving to create a sports arena, hire a coach and offer scholarships to entice 10 top students to join a collegiate team.

A team of video gamers.

The university is launching what it says is the first of its kind in a public university: an e-sports initiative for gamers.

By next fall, UCI will offer a center with high-end gaming PCs, a stage for competitions and a live webcasting studio.

For students like Jesse Wang, 20, it couldn’t get much cooler.

“It’s creating a space and a home for gamers on campus,” said Wang, president of the Association of Gamers at UCI, the school’s largest club.

Wang plays video games an hour or two most days for the same reasons others like a traditional sport: the competition and the teammates who become friends.

“It really is a sport,” Wang said. “People don’t do it casually.”

To make it all happen, Wang teamed up with Mark Deppe, UCI’s assistant director for events and student programming. Wang had the gaming expertise, and Deppe, who doesn’t play, contributed administrative and academic experience.

“I stumbled upon this idea doing a business school report while finishing my MBA,” said Deppe, the new acting director for UCI e-sports. “I did an analysis on the gaming industry.”

UCI already has a computer-game science major and an Institute for Virtual Environments and Computer Games.

“We’re always playing catch-up to UCLA and UC Berkeley,” said Parshan Khosravi, president of the undergraduate student body who helped fast-track the initiative. “When we want to start something, they already have it. Now, they’ll be playing catch-up.”

Last year, College Magazine ranked UCI as the top school in the nation for gamers. Saying “the Anteaters are a force to be reckoned with,” the magazine noted that UCI swept a national League of Legends competition three years straight.

Orange County is already on the video-game map. The virtual reality company Oculus was founded in Irvine, and numerous tech companies call the county home, including Irvine-based Blizzard Entertainment, which created “World of Warcraft” and brings its BlizzCon to the Anaheim Convention Center each year.

“Southern California is the mecca of e-sports,” said Tyrone Wang, e-sport development manager for iBuyPower, an Industry-based company that will equip UCI’s 3,500-square-foot e-sports arena with 80 high-end gaming computers loaded with popular video games.

Riot Games, a game developer that organizes competitions, and iBuyPower will cover most of the estimated $250,000 cost of the UCI arena and help fund the partial scholarships for the students, Deppe said.

“E-sports is where traditional sports were back in the ’50s, before corporate sponsorships,” Tyrone Wang said.

Robert Morris University, a private school in Illinois, was the first, in 2014, to recruit gamers as athletes and offer scholarships. Since then, a handful of private schools have followed.

Competitive video-gaming is becoming big business. Multiplayer battles can be viewed live as broadcasters call play-by-play.

For now, UCI’s Zot Zone is a room of pool tables, several video-game consoles, tables, chairs and sofas. By fall, it will be the e-sports arena.

This week, some students were glad to hear what was coming to the Zot Zone space, but many others were not.

“Oh, no! What about pool lovers, like me?” said Michael Li, a sophomore practicing for an upcoming tournament.

Deppe, the UCI e-sports administrator, said some of the pool tables will end up in residence halls, and university officials are exploring where to place the others.

Said UCI freshman Vab Gowda, watching a live soccer match on a giant screen: “This is a place where a lot of students come to play and relax.”

Further, Gowda said, “Hard-core gaming is dangerous, and to say you can get a scholarship on gaming is encouraging kids on the wrong things.”

Many others, however, are excited by the news.

A survey of 1,200-plus UCI students found that 72 percent identified as gamers and 89 percent supported the creation of an e-sports team, Wang said.

Nick Gasparyan, 18, of Los Angeles wasn’t sure which school he wanted to attend to study computer engineering and computer science. Then the high school senior read about UCI’s e-sports initiative on Facebook.

“I saw that and thought: I could help them grow the program,” Gasparyan said.

That day, he accepted UCI’s offer of admission.

Staff writer Ian Wheeler contributed to this report.

Contact the writer: rkopetman@ocregister.com or twitter@roxanakopetman