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Many toddlers today will play with a Leapfrog Learning Pad or other device as they grow up. Most children and adolescents enjoy the leisurely activity of video gaming with friends online. Even adults are joining clans and groups on professional gaming levels and winning money from the $243 million generated in revenue by esports, according to Jack Dunn for The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

So, why is it taking colleges so long to jump on this bandwagon of revenue? Thankfully, Grand View has a head start, founding its esports program in 2017. Director Nathan Ragsdell and Assistant Director Trevor Horner agreed that GV’s eSports program has brought in, conservatively, $30,000-40,000 in prize winnings and sponsorships since the start of 2019. During the spring semester of 2022, GV’s League of Legends varsity team brought home a $10,000 check along with a first-place finish in one tournament.

Dalton Swaino, a senior at GV majoring in Sports Psychology, is one of those League of Legends varsity collaborators that helped bring home first place and a big check. 

“Being able to compete and have a reward at the end of it was like, it’s always welcome,” Swaino said, using the prize money to pay for his tuition.

Any prize money that a team wins equals over $1,000 per player, and the university takes 10% of the winnings for the school itself. In the case of the $10,000 team prize, Swaino and his teammates had the option of putting it towards their student loans, in their own pockets, or towards the program itself. Each teammate put it towards their student loans, utilizing the $1,800-1,900 in prize money 

towards their tuition. In the case of smaller team wins and prize money ($500 or less), most of the student-athletes have opted for a party for the team or program.

Swaino is looking forward to the upcoming tournaments they have lined up for the spring semester and hopes to bring home more wins and prize money to the esports program GV has established. Both Horner and Ragsdell are former esports players themselves, setting their players up for success. Ragsdell is even a former board member of the National Association of esports Coaches and Directors.

Both offered an inside look into what they look for when they are recruiting student-athletes for their program here at GV. 

“We don’t see somebody’s rank and say, ‘Okay, yeah, you’re definitely gonna get, you know, X amount of award,’” Ragsdell said. “If that were the case then, you know, there’d be a lot of people who grind really hard to get really good and ranked, which is not necessarily transferable to a team environment.”

Ragsdell believes that GV’s esports program is a lot like other team-based sports programs here on campus because of the team cooperation, individual experience, and the preliminary tryouts. These requirements help distinguish which scholarship each individual will receive when coming to GV. The options for scholarship vary with what game students compete in, but all the scholarships are offered for exceptional gameplay in Rocket League, Overwatch, and League of Legends. Other titles include Super Smash Brothers Ultimate, Fortnite, and Valorant. The possibility of expanding to other titles may be appealing to student-athletes.

“The ceiling is infinite,” Swaino said.

Besides esports helping student-athletes financially, there is one other thing that sets them apart from other sports programs. There is no governing body to cover rankings, school sizes, competing divisions or anything like the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) or the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) provides. 

“They’re competing against D-1 schools, D-2 schools, D-3 schools, and NAIA schools. Schools that have vastly different resources that are allowed to their institutions and to their teams,” Ragsdell said.

With the spring semester quickly approaching, Horner felt that the future is not only bright for the GV esports program, but also esports in general among colleges.

  “I think the biggest one is the fact that esports is becoming more commonplace in the high school environment,” Horner said. “Typically, if these programs cannot succeed in high school, people do not want to go on and do that in college. Typically, gaming has been a very isolating experience, but now that schools are getting more involved, building that community, people are like, ‘I really enjoy this.’” 

With an optimistic outlook and an already stellar record over the last three years, the GV esports program looks to keep making an impact and grow its student-athletes inside and outside the digital arena.