Depending on where you look for solid numbers, E-sports could generate a couple hundred million dollars per year, worldwide, or close to $2 billion.
What’s agreed upon is that E-sports are booming, to the point that colleges and universities are increasingly adding E-sports to their programs.
In South Carolina, Coker College, Columbia College, the University of South Carolina, and Winthrop University have E-sports teams. What sets Winthrop apart is that it’s the only college in the state -- and one of the few in the country -- where E-sports players are Division I competitors under the university’s athletics department.
Given that Rock Hill has carved a niche leaning heavily on alternative and unusual sports, like cornhole and disc golf, it wasn’t a stretch for Winthrop to become an early adopter of a Division I E-sports team, said Edward Serna, the university’s president.
“I was at a different institution at the time and I was at the NCAA convention, and [E-sports] was a big topic of conversation back in 2018,” Serna said. “Kudos to the leadership here to recognize the amazing opportunity they had.”
Winthrop’s E-sports program launched in 2019 and grew immediately. The university soon after built a massive E-sports suite in a space adjacent to the Rock Hill Sports and Events Center (whence ESPN Ocho airs coverage of annual cornhole national championships).
Now 106 athletes strong, Winthrop’s E-sports program is poised to be around 140-strong by the end of next year, said Josh Sides, director of Winthrop’s E-sports program. He said the department’s successes have become a kind of marketing tool on their own.
Since Winthrop started competing, it has claimed three national championships and has placed high in international competitions against some of the world’s best professional players.
“It's kind of like an Alabama football-type situation,” Sides said. “Or Duke basketball.”
Which begs the question: What makes a good E-sports player?
“First and foremost, we're a college, so grades is going to be the first thing I ask about,” Sides said. “Is this person someone who can come in and adjust to an academic program while still balancing gaming at a high level? If you can't do that, you're not going to be here for very long.”
But Sides says student athletes also need good character.
“ The most important thing for our team and our program that we look for is, is this a good person?” he said.
Because Serna and Sides both emphasize the student part of student-athlete, they don’t push for the school’s E-sports athletes to worry about going pro.
“ At the end of the journey if you haven't achieved dream number one, the eSports dream,” Sides said, “dream number two: The American dream. You’ve achieved a college degree.”
There have been a couple former Winthrop players who’ve gone pro, beginning with Conner Garcia (a.k.a., GLYPH online), who is now playing professionally in Europe. But Sides wants his players to learn things that sports programs are supposed to teach college athletes of all kinds -- discipline, teamwork, and the ability to take criticism.
As it turns out, pro teams do look for those kinds of qualities in players.
“ Accountability is very huge,” said Jasmine Randolph (a.k.a., Jazzrezz). “Like, being coachable.”
Randolph is the founder of Team Inferno, a pro E-sports team she leads from her home in Lancaster.
Like Sides, Randolph knows there will be egos aplenty among top-level players -- who, for the record, typically spend up to 12 hours a day playing. She’s not looking for swagger, though, just as she’s not looking for people who eat and sleep nothing but gaming. Not primarily, anyway.
“Everybody at this level is good at the game,” Randolph said. “You still have to be able to take the criticism, which is honestly not the easiest thing to find.”
A lot of people who have the talent to be pro players, she said, also have problems controlling their tempers. They become what she called “brand risks.”
“If you get really upset and you start raging at the game, and now you're saying slurs and cussing people out, we just can't deal with that,” she said.
As an African-American woman player, Randolph said she’s dealt with her share of online anger and discrimination. That’s actually why she founded Team Inferno to begin with.
“Our mission is to create a safe space for marginalized communities and increase our representation in gaming,” she said.
So, in addition to the qualities of being a generally good human being, Randolph specifically looks for team members who believe in the mission.
“ I've just heard a lot of personal stories and how impactful this has been for them,” she said. “That's really just the whole goal, just spreading that kind of positivity around this community.”
While Randolph doesn’t yet believe that E-sports as a college major would be a worthwhile pursuit -- she said the field is too young to really know what a degree program would be good at teaching -- she does like that colleges like Winthrop have teams in Division I. It legitimizes her sport, she said. And it provides scholarship opportunities that might otherwise not exist for students.
Take Emin Aydin, who came to Rock Hill from Turkey.
“Without [my] scholarship, there's no way I will be here,” Aydin said. “I'm really glad that there's opportunity at Winthrop. It enables you to study and compete.”
And compete, he knows how to do. Before coming to Winthrop, Aydin was a pro E-sports player in Turkey, between 2017 and 2021.
He wants to finish college, but he does still have the dream of continuing to play.
“I want to keep going on E-sports because I'm doing this since I was 16,” he said. “I don't want to waste my experience.”
With literal millions of players gaming around the world, Aydin knows he has competition. Just around here, to put the odds in some perspective, Jazzrezz put out her first call for players for Team Inferno during the Covid pandemic. She got 3,000 replies.
And has a team of three.
