--- title: Pressing Play date: 2021-10-12T05:30:00-04:00 author: University of Maryland canonical_url: "https://today.umd.edu/pressing-play" section: Articles --- # Pressing Play *October 12, 2021* — by [Liam Farrell](/author/liam-farrell) > Esports Have Become an International Phenomenon. With Terps Already Competing at the Highest Levels, UMD Powers Up Support for Gamers. *Esports 1920x1080 — The student group UMCP Gaming has put esports teams into national competitions for thousands of dollars in prizes. University Recreation and Wellness plans to hire its first esports coordinator to provide the same administrative support that club sports now enjoy.* **BRENDAN HEGARTY GRASPED EARLY** in his first semester at the University of Maryland that the lectures, papers and tests of college life weren’t squaring with his constant urge to slip away to an exotic island where he could practice skydiving, bunker construction and cold-blooded sniping of his enemies. A $30 million prize pool up for grabs didn’t hurt, either. So in a Fall 2018 departure possible only in the digital age, he temporarily traded in his student ID for a chance to secure a spot in the lucrative championship of a sport that requires those survival skills—albeit only in a world made up of electrons and transistors. “I figured I should just focus on one,” says Hegarty ’23. “Fortnite was not gonna wait for me.” Hegarty’s attempt to go pro in that video game, a global phenomenon created by Tim Sweeney ’93’s Epic Games, is just one point on the scoreboard showing the rise of so-called “esports” from a niche cultural curiosity to a billion-dollar industry that fills arenas, streams to millions of fans and awards huge prizes. Esports has also leveled up at colleges and universities, graduating from student union arcades and dorm room GoldenEye 007 sessions to full-blown institutional interest. Across the country, higher education has started doling out scholarships and investing in the uniforms, hardware and building space needed to compete, like in traditional sports. And while UMD is only beginning to dip its toes into the deep end, gaming grassroots have already grown strong in College Park with students like Hegarty. Despite falling just short in Fortnite World Cup qualification and keeping his promise to return to UMD rather than hold on to a full-time pursuit of esports, he hasn’t disconnected his keyboard yet: So far, Hegarty has earned about $35,000 in cash prizes and scholarships from his gaming exploits. “I stuck to my word,” he says. “I still made a pretty good amount of money.” --- **COMPETITION ITSELF** has always been part of video games, be it chasing the high score on Centipede at the local pizza parlor or the well-documented quest for the world record on Donkey Kong. The first known tournament took place in 1972 at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The 20 or so players there squared off in Spacewar!, pounding buttons to pilot triangle spaceships and fire dot missiles at each other. The last player standing amid the pixelated debris took home the grand prize: a year’s subscription to *Rolling Stone* magazine. The advent of one-on-one fighting arcade games like Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat supercharged the scene in the 1990s before advances in console, computing and internet technology turned multiplayer gaming competitions into a genuine international powerhouse. By 2017, the “Bird’s Nest” stadium in Beijing, built for the Summer Olympics, hosted the League of Legends World Championship with as much flair as any other sporting event, opening the final rounds with musical acts, choreographed dancers and even an [augmented-reality dragon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP3fGkpmVM0) swooping through the venue before stone-faced competitors in matching corporate-sponsored outfits squared off for millions of dollars. The COVID-19 pandemic, forcing the cancellation of in-person activities worldwide, was a ready-made pivot point for esports; its audience grew nearly 10% last year to 435.9 million people, according to Newzoo, a gaming analytics firm that has projected a further 9% growth in 2021. The opportunity to fill the suddenly empty hours didn’t go unnoticed by traditional sports media, either; ESPN aired a tournament of 16 NBA players taking on each other in NBA 2K20, and FOX Sports even showed NASCAR drivers competing in virtual races. Overall, esports is capitalizing on younger millennial and Generation Z consumers whose childhoods were filled with these types of games, says Hank Boyd, clinical professor in the Robert H. Smith School of Business’ marketing department. Competition organizers, he says, have also had the foresight to combine gaming with other forms of entertainment to hold attention spans—for example, a Lil Nas X performance hosted last November by the Roblox platform garnered 33 million views and, a few months earlier, several Fortnite shows by rapper Travis Scott collected 45.8 million views. In other words, you can feast on not only a gaming version of the Super Bowl, but also its halftime show. “It’s a game, but it’s really more than a game,” Boyd says. “This is something that’s defining a generation.” --- *Esports fans cheer during the finals of the 2019 Fortnite World Cup held at New York City’s Arthur Ashe Stadium.* --- **GIVEN THE DEMOGRAPHICS—**a 2018 poll found that 58% of Americans ages 14 to 21 had played video games competitively—higher education was destined to become a fertile field for esports. Smaller schools were some of the earliest to jump on the bandwagon for various institutional and cultural reasons, seeing them as a way to bolster everything from student enrollment to campus pride. In 2014, Robert Morris University Illinois became the first college to promote esports to a varsity competition, launching a League of Legends team with up to 50% tuition and 50% room-and-board scholarships for eligible gamers. Since then, more than 170 schools with varsity esports programs have joined together in the [National Association of Collegiate Esports](https://nacesports.org/), representing more than 5,000 student-athletes and $16 million in scholarships and aid. Within a 250-mile radius of College Park, however, the vast majority of these varsity programs are at schools that otherwise compete in Division III, and none has football in the so-called Power Five conferences, the general marker of top-tier collegiate athletics programs. While it’s clear how select student gamers would benefit from the uniforms, equipment, facilities and increased prestige that would come with a varsity designation, it’s less obvious at this nascent stage for a university like UMD, which has legions of fans devoted to traditional athletics programs, an already-large base of STEM students and plenty of existing opportunities for Terps to compete at tournaments. UMCP Gaming, for example, has put teams into the American Video Game League, North American Competitive Collegiate Series, Collegiate Open League and other competitions for thousands of dollars in prizes. In the Collegiate Star League, UMD teams were collectively ranked fourth at the end of last year, behind only the University of Ottawa, the University of California-Berkeley and Northeastern University. In December, the trio of Hegarty, Erik “Mars” Kelemen ’22 and Mazin “Se7enn” Karjikar ’24 split $15,000 in tuition prize money by taking first place in the PlayVS collegiate Fortnite league affiliated with Epic Games. In March, Hegarty and Kelemen divvied up another $1,000 from topping the AVGL Collegiate Champions League. So far, the institutional footprint at UMD has been limited to intramural, one-on-one competitions in franchises like NBA2K, Madden football and FIFA Soccer, in addition to Fortnite and team leagues for Rocket League. But new opportunities are coming—University Recreation and Wellness (RecWell) is hiring its first esports coordinator, for example, to give the same administrative support around facilities, travel and fundraising that club sports like crew, rugby and ultimate Frisbee already enjoy. Other ideas under consideration include repurposing underused racquetball courts in the Eppley Recreation Center for club esports teams and the general student body, or putting aside space in The Diner after a new north campus dining hall opens. UMD is also analyzing what peer institutions such as Ohio State, Rutgers and Penn State have furnished for esports, and is identifying approximate space and technology needs, says Jay Gilchrist, director of RecWell. The pandemic, however, short-circuited early discussions, and an ensuing budget crunch plus an ongoing premium on available campus space will remain considerations. “(Gamers) get an incredible sense of pride representing the university. That’s one of the things any university is looking for in the long run,” Gilchrist says. “It’s just going to have to be an organically grown thing.” Hegarty, for his part, thinks UMD—and college esports in general—are a sleeping giant. Now the president of UMCP Gaming and a campus ambassador for the Alienware brand of gaming products from Dell, he believes it’s only a matter of time before warring leagues consolidate and push in a unified direction. “In a few years it will be that way,” he says. “Everyone is fighting for that market share.” --- *Terp gamers come together at the 2019 Harvest Moon LAN (local area network) event in the Computer Science Instructional Center hosted by UMCP Gaming* *Terp gamer* **Sidebar note:** This story is featured on the cover of the Fall 2021 issue of *Terp* magazine. Find all the stories online at [terp.umd.edu](https://terp.umd.edu/). **Topics:** [Campus & Community](https://today.umd.edu/tags/campus-community) **Units:** [University Recreation and Wellness](https://today.umd.edu/topic/university-recreation-and-wellness)