Football, lacrosse and video gaming: Lebanon Valley College begins varsity esports program

While playing video games is a popular form of entertainment, is it really a sport? Lebanon Valley College says yes.

“A lot of people not of this generation, they just don’t understand that this is one of the dominant media forms and one of the dominant forms of entertainment, and it’s a big deal,” said Jeff Ritchie, professor of design, media and technology at LVC.

After discovering that several of his students were competitively playing video games such as League of Legends, a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) that is very popular internationally, and Overwatch, a first-person shooter with some MOBA elements, Ritchie proposed to his colleagues that LVC should make esports a varsity sport on campus.

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“I sent an email to (Vice President of Student Affairs) Greg Krikorian saying that I think this is something we should be doing,” Ritchie said. “This was early last fall. I hadn’t heard anything for a little while, so I sent another email and then forwarded the email to Rick Beard, the director of athletics, who – and I confess I was surprised – was so on-board with this.”

Beard then passed the idea on to Senior Director of Information Technology David Shapiro and LVC’s president, Lewis Thayne.

All involved thought it was a great idea, according to Ritchie.

“Everyone said that this is the biggest thing they’ve never heard of,” he said. “It speaks to the disconnect – it’s kind of like the 1960s when it was, ‘You youngsters and your rock 'n' roll,’ and now it’s, ‘You youngsters and your video games.’”

Within about a month, LVC signed with the National Association of Collegiate Esports (NACE), an organization that has about 50 colleges and universities participating in esports with varsity teams.

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After signing with NACE and announcing the intent to recruit students for a team, Shapiro, who is overseeing the program, had plenty of candidates to choose from.

“Thirty-eight students filled out an inquiry form on our website starting over the holiday break until the first week or two after the break,” Shapiro said. “There are just a few who probably won’t end up playing (with the final number likely being 35 or 36 players).”

The players are separated under three different video games specifically chosen due to their popularity among students and because they are already being played by NACE schools.

The games are League of Legends, Overwatch and Hearthstone, an online video card game made by Blizzard, the company behind both World of Warcraft and the aforementioned Overwatch.

And the students aren’t playing these games casually with friends who are hanging out in the dorm room, Shapiro said. This is being approached by the school as a serious sport like football or lacrosse.

“This is a varsity sport. These students report under athletics. They sign policies, they have to meet academic levels, they have eligibility and they compete with coaches, so it is a very different thing (than casual gaming),” Shapiro said.

Their head coach, Joe D’Angelo, and assistant coaches, Jordan Shankroff and Kyle Rosen, all have previous competitive gaming experience with D’Angelo and Rosen both having connections in the professional gaming world, according to Shapiro.

Ritchie who has played video games and even taught a few classes about them, had the relevance of esports driven home to him after learning just how big professional gaming has become.

“In terms of audience, you have the Super Bowl, then immediately under that the League of Legends tournament and then under that the World Series,” Ritchie said. “When you look at it in terms of eyeballs it is a huge deal.”

“Esports, which is loosely defined as professional competitive gaming of any kind, is experiencing a meteoric, seemingly exponential rise in worldwide popularity, particularly among young men,” Daniel Rapaport wrote in a February 2017 article for Sports Illustrated.

The event Rapaport was covering, the International Dota 2 Championship, had a $20.7 million purse. The winning team, a Chinese team called Wings Gaming, split $9.1 million between its five members.

“A lot of people not of this generation, they just don’t understand that this is one of the dominant media forms and one of the dominant forms of entertainment,” Ritchie said.

The LVC team will have uniforms, made by Canadian company Akquire, and sponsors since the NACE, unlike the NCAA, allows their teams to have sponsors. Twitch, a place for gamers to stream their game-playing abilities on their own channels and where many professional tournaments are aired, will be sponsoring the team.

Two other well-known companies likely will be sponsoring the team, but Shapiro was not at liberty to announce them yet since they were still in the process of signing with both of them.

A $10,000 scholarship for students playing on the esports team will also come into play starting sometime in fall 2019, according to Shapiro. The scholarship is based on the school’s existing honors band scholarship.

“It’s paid over four years and given out to the best students based on academics and ability. We have that already for our honors band students – if they play in our honors band they can earn that coming into LVC as a music major,” Shapiro said.

Just as with other sports, there is a chance students playing on the esports team could go pro.

“Kyle Rosen, who is the League of Legends coach, has a lot of experience bringing players up into pro ranks, and one of the nice things about having Kyle with us is that hopefully we’ll have one or two students come out of this group that will have a shot – whether they take it or not is up to them – to make it into the pro ranks if they want to,” Shapiro said.

LVC esports athlete Justin Knecht, who already has his own Twitch channel, would like to have the opportunity to game professionally.

“I would definitely do this professionally if it leads to that,” Knecht said. “I’ve been streaming for four years now, and I’d love to make a living at this.”

Knecht, 20, is a Digital Communications major who is playing League of Legends for the team.

“There is a lot of mental focus and mental strain – not physical strain – in playing League of Legends,” he said. “You have to focus on objective taking, where you should be positioned on the map, your gold income, your experience as well as listening to your teammates and being able to discuss a strategy.”

Nick Pollak, 21, of Walkersville, Maryland and a Chemistry and Physics major, said he feels that playing LoL is like playing baseball as both player and manager.

“I think the best analogy I can give – I’m going back to traditional sports on this because I’m a big sports guy on top of esports – is like the manager of a baseball team late in the game and depending on what’s happening they are going to send out different batters or put a pinch runner on second base if you’re down by a run with one out and a decent power hitter up,” he said. “It’s the same thing in League of Legends when you have to manage your gold resources to build your character more offensively or more defensively depending on the given situation.”

Because esports is a varsity sport, the college is also keeping tabs on their players’ health and well-being.

“We haven’t done this yet since the team just started, but we are teaming with our strength and conditioning coach for response time reflexes,” Shapiro said. “We are in conversations with some of our health sciences people – from both a psychology standpoint and physical standpoint – to monitor heart rates, mental focus, vision and such to do some baseline studies, probably in the fall. One of our coaches is also tasked with addressing healthy eating habits.”

A video produced by LVC on the new program can be found here.