League of Legends — a multiplayer online battle arena game with a massive global following — was their game of choice, the addictive pastime of their social group, an outlet for friendly competition. “And then all of a sudden a few of us started playing a LOT,” said Jerry Yang, one of those kids from Wootton High.

Which meant they started to move up the ranks. They entered a national prep tournament, then entered it again the following year and won, earning $10,000 worth of scholarship money. They enrolled at the University of Maryland and wound up becoming that school’s official LoL team, getting permission from the athletic department to use the school’s name and logos. They advanced to the semifinals of last year’s uLoL Campus Series playoffs, earning $7,500 of scholarship money apiece. When the Big Ten Network got involved this year, they received even more scholarship money, $5,000 each, simply for participating on Maryland’s team. They won that inaugural competition (which included teams from most Big Ten schools), allowing them to represent Maryland in this week’s College Championship quarterfinals, which begin Thursday in Los Angeles.

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And so, just imagine the satisfaction. Imagine the renown. Imagine how much pride they’re now feeling in what they’ve accomplished.

“Uhhhh. I mean, kind of,” said Martin Kwan, a veteran of all of these competitions. “But it’s also like we invested so much time into this game, I feel like it’s not that big of an accomplishment, honestly.”

Well. Okay. But the glory, Martin. Remember the awe of representing the Terps on this grand national platform, the joy of winning that glorious conference title.

“Winning it was nice, but I don’t know, I feel like we could be a lot better,” Kwan said. “I mean, I guess it’s more like we’re not really on the same page on what exactly we want to accomplish. There’s kind of mixed opinions on how much we want to try.”

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Look, we’re still in the initial gold-rush period of college eSports, which frankly makes it all a lot more fun. There are already a few well-financed collegiate mega-programs such as the ones at UC Irvine and Robert Morris-Illinois — whom the Terps will face in the quarterfinals — but there is also some level of do-it-yourself entrepreneurship.

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The Terps were eliminated by Robert Morris in last year’s semifinals, and players couldn’t help but notice the contrast in programs. That Illinois private school, with the first varsity collegiate eSports program, fields teams in seven different games (including League); receives snazzy online treatment by the school’s athletic department; lists a director, a program coordinator and six LoL coaches; and plays in a (sponsored) eSports arena. Rather than playing their matches in a dedicated eSports arena, Maryland’s players are “all in our dorms, chilling,” as Kwan put it. And good luck finding any mention of their Big Ten title on the Maryland athletics website.

The original leader of Maryland’s team, another Wootton alum, has since left the sport, but the Terps have marched on. They have an ambitious leader in Sri Talluri, who handles logistics, coordinates with Maryland’s athletic department and just graduated from the university’s business school. They’ve supplemented their Wootton core with Ben and Jason Xue, twins from Kansas, who found the Maryland team via Reddit and hadn’t actually met all their teammates until a group meal at Nando’s after the season already began. Their best player remains Jon Yang, another Wootton alum and expert in League strategy, who says he plays for the Terps because “it’s free money,” and describes his daily time commitment as “not much.”

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“I saw him play 10 games in a day,” Jerry Yang pointed out. (Games take about 30 minutes each.)

“Not anymore,” said Jon Yang, no relation to Jerry. “I used to. Now I play one game a day, maybe. I guess I’m not as refined as I used to be.”

The players — five starters, a sub and an analyst/coach, whose group mission is to knock out the opponent’s base — study computer science and electrical engineering. Their parents don’t really understand this League thing (“they just know I play some game; they kind of want me to stop,” Kwan said). They are hilarious and likable and self-aware, and also kind of different from the typical Division I athlete. And yet Riot Games — the developer of League, which now boasts 100 million active monthly players, making it perhaps the largest PC game in the world — sees a future in which e-gamers are integrated into athletic departments.

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“If you want these players to be successful, you want to put them in a place where they have the same expertise and level of team-building that athletics does,” said Michael Sherman, the college eSports lead for Riot Games. “Athletic departments are built to build championship teams, from building facilities to creating success structures for students, things like tutoring and academic support. That is the part of the school that’s made to build champions, so we think it’s really important that the teams kind of live there.”

Which brings us to the whole winning thing, and how much that should matter to Maryland’s unlikely national representatives. It’s the sort of topic that doesn’t typically come up in interviews with football or volleyball players, but this is a strange new realm with its own quirks. Maryland’s scholarship money last year was dependent on advancing deep into the college tournament, which meant there was a financial incentive to practice, and to win. This year’s guaranteed Big Ten Network arrangement took away the link between success and cash.

The Terps still won the first-ever conference title, thanks in part to Michigan getting upset in the playoffs, meaning they matched up with a weaker Illinois team in the finals. That event was held in late March in L.A., and was shown live on the Big Ten Network — the first live eSports broadcast in network history — with the Terps rolling to a 3-0 sweep. (“It was competitive in the sense that both teams were just hella sloppy,” Kwan said of that matchup. “Both teams were kind of just playing subpar, so it was competitive in that sense.”)

Since then the Maryland kids have had finals — the academic kind — and band performances and the rest of their busy college lives to attend to. The national bracket probably didn’t play out in their favor, with that quarterfinal matchup against powerhouse Robert Morris, which has been runner-up to the University of British Columbia two years in a row. So, at least some of the Terps wondered why they should practice when the prize for success didn’t have any dollar signs. For who? For what? The team held something like two group practice sessions over the past month, leading up to its most prestigious event of the year.

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“I think some players are more incentivized by money,” Kwan said. “Since there’s no money for actually winning, I feel like our performance is going to be pretty bad.”

“That’s kind of the big thing for a few of the players on our team is that there’s no money at stake,” Jerry Yang agreed. “There’s not that much on the line. I mean, winning is cool.”

Again, cherish this strange moment. Ten years from now, college eSports will either have fizzled or metastasized into some corporate-fueled behemoth whose players don’t laugh when asked if what they’re doing is a sport (“there’s definitely no sweating,” Kwan said), or when asked if they’re recognized on campus, or when asked whether they’ll be greeted as heroes if they return from California with a national championship. (“We’re just regular Asian nerds, yo,” Kwan joked in response to that last question.) The future will almost certainly be more structured, with more adults calling the shots.

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“We’re trying to build League of Legends into a global sport,” said Sherman, from Riot Games, who envisions large-scale recruiting of high school players in the future. “Looking at North America, we have a pretty well-structured professional level of play. And so looking at the next big opportunity, we see colleges as a big steppingstone toward reaching that level of a global sport.”

There is big money in all of this, which is why NBA owners are snapping up professional teams, and why journalists are covering it, and why the Big Ten Network is getting involved. (Riot Games hasn’t announced whether that competition will continue next year, but the first attempt was considered a success.)

None of this is what the Wootton kids imagined when they started playing the game seven or eight years ago. None of them is likely to turn pro — “if they offered me the money I’d do it,” said Jon Yang, the team’s best player, although he said it would be a long shot. And they aren’t exactly jealous of the Robert Morris kids and their superior infrastructure, since it all comes with private school tuition at a less prestigious institution. (“The school is not that great, I think,” Kwan said. “I’d be paying a lot of money just to play League of Legends, which doesn’t really make sense to me.”)

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And through it all, they still love the game. Some said the best part of playing for Maryland’s team has been the chance to study higher-level organized contests, and Kwan estimated he has spent a full year of his life playing this video game he picked up as a teenager. Despite the championships and the scholarships and this week’s trip to L.A., he isn’t always sure it was worth it. But he’s a critical thinker, which means he’s willing to consider the other side.