One of the first things that Rick Fox changed when he bought an eSports organization was the practice time.

“Rick came in, he was like, ‘Why are we scrimming (practicing against other teams) past noon? That’s really late,’ ” said the team’s general manager, Jake Fyfe. “We need to wake up in the morning with the sun. Why are we waking up at 11:30?”

Then, came the opponents.

“‘Why are we practicing against the opponents that we’re gonna play in three weeks?’” the former NBA player asked. “ ‘I don’t care if the game will change in three weeks. You’re showing tendencies and patterns and this.”

And then, the nutrition.

“‘Why are they eating this?” Fyfe remembered him asking, “‘I couldn’t even chew gum when I was a player. Why are you giving these guys the option to eat a Pop-Tart? Their health should look like this. The food should look like this. The fridge should look like this.’”

When the three-time NBA champ bought an eSports organization, it was because he saw an opportunity, especially after attending and feeling the incredible energy at the 2015 League of Legends Championship at Madison Square Garden. But now, members of the team say, he’s changing the game itself.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BUhmsk0B7G4/?hl=en&taken-by=imrickafox

With former San Jose Sharks co-owner Stratton Sclavos as an investor, former NBAer Jared Jeffries as president and Fox as the owner of Echo Fox, it’s no surprise they choose to do things differently than other organizations not run by three people who have experience in two of the biggest sports leagues in the U.S.

Fyfe said the former Laker is “not afraid to challenge what all of these other team owners” are doing. Fox hasn’t just demanded more from his team; he’s provided more, as well.

“… Salaries have increased maybe like at least 400 percent since he came in two years ago,” he said. “He’s done all sorts of good things for eSports as a whole.”

However, when Fox was asked about all of this — changing the culture of eSports — he said that his organization isn’t the first to do things like pay attention to fitness and explore ways their players can get competitive advantages, but he did say that he believes they’ve “enhanced” and “been an amplifier to the conversation” because of their pro sports backgrounds.

Whether they were first to it or not, Echo Fox has clearly put its players first in a way that was sorely needed in the eSports industry. They’re the only eSports org to be partnered with TriFitLA, which is a fitness club and USA Triathlon Certified Performance Center based in Santa Monica.

To create a fitness plan for Echo Fox athletes, TriFit co-founder Gina Baski said they got the help of a professor in the UCLA Brain Research Institute “to put together a baseline of cognitive factors” to test. She said that there’s no research out there on performance indicators for gamers, so they have to figure it out as they go along.

They test the gamers for working memory, reaction time, grip strength (an indicator of brain activity), blood pressure, body fat, VO2 max (maximum amount of oxygen a person can use while exercising) in addition to having them do cardio, strength training, meditation, yoga and monitoring their nutrition and sleep.

Baski said that in a 12-week period, there was a three to six percent improvement in the indicators mentioned above.

“Beyond just the training, because it is a highly cognitive sport, we have to look at those indicators and what is going to move the needle the most on them: Is it the exercise, is it the sleep, is it nutrition, is it hydration?” Baski said. “They’re sitting for long period of time, so really tapping in and drilling down on the cognitive factors has been a big part of what we’re doing with Echo Fox.

“I think what they’re looking at is long-game and long-game is you can’t have all these guys retire at 22. You can’t invest in them and have them retire two years later because they’re so burned out.”

TriFit co-founder Bernard Baski, who’s Gina’s husband, said that there are challenges in working with eSports athletes, since it takes them a while to understand how being healthy can actually make them better gamers, unlike other athletes who have been active their entire lives.

“There’s a little bit of a challenge there,” Bernard said, “but I think they understand now as they keep maturing into the sport they’re realizing that we look at them as athletes also and that any athlete that wants to get better at their craft, even if it’s playing games behind a computer, exercising is crucial.”

How is this helping gamers? Why does cardio training and oxygen intake matter?

“It’s helped so much, I think, just from the raw data alone. When the guys know how to breathe on stage, some guys get so nervous on stage, especially amateurs, we teach them breathing, we teach them recovery and stress,” Fyfe, the Echo Fox GM, said. “They’re literally staring at a screen getting a million stimulus constantly for 12 hours, and they never rest — ever — so we’re seeing how breaks help their reaction times. We’re starting to get tools where we can look at eye tracking. How many times they look at the map, which is a function of map awareness, with lack of sleep or poor diet or with anything.

“Our philosophy is there might be teams that are better than us in terms of talent, maybe five percent better than us, but if they’re playing at 80 percent because of their fitness and exercise programs and we’re playing at 95 percent, even if we’re a little bit worse than them, if we are playing our best and we’re at our best health, we’ll beat them.”

Brandon “Brandini” Chen, has been involved in the fitness program since January. He echoed what Fyfe said when talking about why eSports is a real sport:

“Mentally and physically it can be pretty straining for a person, like even practicing for six hours straight on a computer will wear you out. Like, I feel tired and rest for an hour, which is why the TriFit thing also helps us.”

Love my parents for doing this ☺️. Can't wait for next year! pic.twitter.com/TinqcGz3K8 — Brandini (@Fox_Brandini) September 18, 2017

But not everyone realizes how much it mentally and physically takes to be a pro gamer.

As Jeffries put it, “People still have the vision of a kid sitting in his basement for 20 hours.”

Even Jeffries, the president of Echo Fox, admitted he was skeptical about getting into eSports at first. He’s definitely not anymore. Now he has seen and been shocked by how similar eSports is to other mainstream sports, such as basketball.

“Then just come try it,” he said. “These guys dedicate so much of their time and their life to it — their muscle memory, their quick twitch muscles in their hands, their conditioning to be able to sit there and play a game for hours on end, it’s unfair to look at it like that because if you took a professional gamer and someone that’s very good, he’ll win every single time. Just like in any other sport. If you take a professional in any other sport and put him against the layman, that person stands no chance.”

And this is where the fitness program ties in. Fox said that he wants parents to know that the eSports industry can support their kids. There are eSports college scholarships available and if you fall short of that, there are still other opportunities in streaming, game designing and in other parts of the industry. Gina Baski and TriFit are attempting to help people see that.

“I think we can all agree there’s still a little bit of a stigma attached to video gaming like, ‘Are you seriously looking at this? It’s not a real sport.’ There’s still a stigma and I think it’s great that Rick is like, ‘This is something you should be proud that your kids are doing,’” Gina said. “I don’t think we’re there yet, so we’re like, ‘How can we help create this paradigm shift that you can be an eSport athlete and be healthy and train like an athlete and have a long career?’ So that’s what excites us the most.”

Even though it may take years for mainstream sports fans to see eSports as a legitimate form of competition that takes a great amount of skill, Fox, while fittingly wearing an NBA jacket over an Echo Fox shirt, said that the talent level that he’s encountered is already elite.

“It has surprised me that I’ve met individuals and we have individuals in our organization who rival some of the greats I’ve played with in terms of their passion and their drive to get better day to day, their hunger to win,” Fox said. “And I’ve played with Kobe. I’ve played with Larry Bird. I’ve played with great, iconic basketball players, and we have certain individuals in our organization who have the same commitment to their craft and push themselves and push their teammates on that same level, and when I see it, I thought that was gonna be something that would have to develop. I thought it was 10 years from now that I come across those professional gaming athletes that had that mentality and, no, it’s just innate in some people.

“Some people just rise to the top and become the cream of the crop because from birth, they just had that genetic makeup and they chose this to be their form of expression.”