Startup Culture Shouldn't Last Forever
The path to stability and relevancy for collegiate esports doesn’t start with burning every bridge behind you
Introduction
In my talks with colleagues who are higher education researchers, many of them note that putting a positive spin on the data they collect about collegiate esports is a really difficult task. There is a growing mountain of evidence that collegiate is propped up more on promises and IOUs than any actual sound business practice, and that is only sustainable for so long. We are quickly heading on the path of a failed startup, and without positive and purposeful efforts towards change, collegiate esports could end up as just a blip on the history of academia. I don’t want to see collegiate falter and die because, for the students who call it home, it is one of the most meaningful parts of college, and sometimes life, for them. I’m writing this piece as a reflection on where we stand now as an industry, where we falter and fail, and how we need to mold ourselves and grow beyond startup culture if we are to continue to grow ourselves into a staple in higher education.
It seems like almost every day there is some new controversy shaking the collegiate and/or professional esports space. From layoffs to infighting to fraud to cheating and so many more things, when you go beneath the surface of esports social media, with all of its professional and well done graphics and posts, the community itself is fraught with drama and a poorly determined understanding of what professionalism is.
Depending on where you check and how you define the true starting point of esports, whether it be Space Invaders competitions in the 80’s or the more modern spin on it seen with StarCraft and others in the early 2000’s, esports is 25+ years old. Furthermore, starting most notably with the now defunct Robert Morris University (Chicago) esports program in 2014, collegiate esports is nearing 10 years old from when it first started and nearly six years out from when well established programs started. The ways in which we are still indelibly tied to internet culture baffles outsiders consistently. Why do we so willingly accept that collegiate esports has all the cultural signs of a failed startup? Why do we continue to stay rooted in our ways and refuse to do better? How can collegiate esports expect to be taken seriously by outside stakeholders, most notably the ones that monetarily and structurally allow us to exist at institutions, if we are genuinely an un-serious industry?
The upheaval and layoffs and massive financial instability that gaming and esports as a whole is seeing right now is not something that collegiate esports is immune to. While the failings of professional esports is far beyond the scope of this piece, collegiate is not the end-all be-all solution to the woes of the industry. Honestly, collegiate isn’t even close to being as stable as some people think it is. We are plagued by problems that we identified upwards of five years ago or longer and still let persist. We are so overburdened by other things, or in many cases unprepared to address them, that we end up pushing issues off onto someone else or, if we do try to solve it, we create a committee to cover it that will proclaim itself as the new organizational group in collegiate, only to sputter out and die in two years.
Obligatory Credentials for Those Who Gatekeep
I realize that not every reader of this piece may know who I am, so I want to give a brief introduction to myself, my history with esports, and why I genuinely care so much about this space that I would dare criticize it so heavily for the sake of growth. So first off, hi, I’m Cora! I’ve been invested in esports ever since I started competing in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 back in 2013 and, upon entering college in 2014, I started heavily following CS:GO, LoL, and basically every other game I could get my hands on. I watched and played so much CS:GO my first two years of college that the old CS:GO stream overlay is burned in on my TV from my dorm. In my later years of college I started actively scrimming and competing in R6 and upon graduation with my math education degree, I started teaching high school. At that school I started an esports program the second day of new teacher training and ran that, along with a high school state league, for three years before coming to IWU to be the full time Director of Esports here. Since coming to IWU I have worked as the head TO of Venom, the world's first GC Valorant LAN (to my knowledge), created Aurora Series, and served on committees across partnerships, DEI, competition, and community engagement.
In terms of esports, I’ve been there and done that. I’ve casted, produced, observed, coached, competed, TO’d, been upper management, done media, and pretty much anything else you can think of, oftentimes many of them concurrently. I am not saying I know everything about esports and gaming, and in fact there are a great many things I know that I don’t know, but fuck me if I don’t genuinely love and care about esports. I wouldn’t be here, putting 80 hour weeks in for the past six years with long sleepless nights, an inability to ever disconnect, and my every waking thought filled with work, if I didn’t truly care. The reason I feel compelled to give my qualifications is because I know that if I do not, many people will jump to gatekeep me and prevent my opinions from being seen as valid because I’m perceived as not qualified enough to point out obvious flaws in our system. I know I need to prove myself, who I am, my qualifications, and why I “deserve” to be heard out in order for anyone to even read beyond this section.
I am writing this piece because I care, potentially too much, about collegiate esports. The amount of good that collegiate esports does cannot be understated. The genuine smiles on the faces of students when they see their team succeed or attend events or any cool marquee moment in their time in collegiate is what I live for. We send students to college where many may not have even sought it out before, we teach a whole host of soft skills, we help some students find meaning in their daily lives, we serve as a cornerstone of their life in a time where so much is changing, act as mentors, parental figures, and friends to those that need it the most, the list goes on and on. Collegiate esports does so many wonderful things for the students we serve, and we make such a positive difference in the lives of so many, but we need to get out of our own way.
This piece is borne out of my frustration with how collegiate esports is refusing to progress beyond accepting startup culture for what it is and patently alienating itself from academia for the sake of convenience. We don’t have to constantly be at odds with ourselves, others, and our parent institutions. We absolutely need to understand and grow as a part of academia instead of insisting we are different enough to warrant special treatment. I am not saying everyone needs to have the experience of an educator or previous academic professional, but what I am saying is that we all need to actually learn what academia is like before we try to “revolutionize” it by refusing to listen. I will not be naming names or directly calling people/organizations out because that is counterproductive and only serves to hurt the message trying to be conveyed. What I want to be the end result of all of this is for people to look themselves in the mirror, objectively evaluate the program they run or are a part of, and commit to doing better. A revolution starts with a single brick, and together we can continue to make this space something we are proud of.
How Collegiate Esports is Stuck in Startup Culture
Someone shouldn’t be able to ask me “did you hear about that controversy in esports last week” and I have to ask them to clarify which one they’re talking about. This, along with many other things, are emblematic of the culture of a toxic tech startup in the dot-com bubble, or even now, and this section is dedicated to identifying how many of the ways toxic startups function mirror how collegiate esports functions as well. While many of these points mirror what exists in professional esports, that is not an acceptable excuse. We are educators, a part of academia! We should model professional conduct and behavior for our students and handle things like adults, not petulant children. We cannot let our culture be determined by people who won’t, or can’t, be us.
Ego Driven Culture
Bravado and esports go hand in hand, but it doesn’t need to be that way. We have seemingly created, and encouraged, a culture where we value ego-based decision making over almost everything else. For good or for bad, esports, and by extension collegiate esports, lives on social media. In turn, we also die on social media. It is an almost daily occurrence that our perpetually online industry culture sees a new controversy pop out of nowhere on Twitter. Public callouts, vague tweets meant to ruffle someone’s ego, direct accusations, and more all permeate the sphere of esports social media and many staff at collegiate programs find themselves feeding into it. Interspersed with inane, meaningless takes that are self-aggrandizing at best come posts from staff, full grown adults, that amount to nothing more than ego duels. Everyone wants to act like they have the moral high ground but all it ends up coming out as is obsessive infighting for little tangible gain.
While the corporate world is very much not free from drama, they mostly take care of it like competent and professional adults whereas collegiate esports would rather turn to making a large public callout and let the court of public opinion take over. This almost obsessive rush to social media any time you feel wronged by a person or organization would be comical if it wasn’t so frustratingly consistent. The lack of an ability to address things directly with someone and settle it like well reasoned adults just shows how far collegiate esports needs to go before it can be taken seriously in academia. The amount of drama in academia is monumental at times and as someone who worked as a researcher and has witnessed it live, it’s childish yes. But it is not on public display for all to see and people generally resolve their differences like adults.
Furthermore, everything is somehow a contest in collegiate esports. Are we really that sucked into our own ego that we want to make every conversation about winning and losing? Yes, we are a fundamentally competitive ecosystem as we are founded around competition between institutions, but one of the greatest benefits I have always touted about academic esports is just how friendly this industry is. Every coach and director was always willing to talk with others and help each other out. My handbook for the high school team was a straight up rip (with permission) of the 2017-2018 Oswego High School esports handbook with some modifications to suit my situation.
We learn and grow together and this industry was built on the backs of helping each other for the sake of growth for all, so why are we so insistent on making everything into a contest? Social engagement statistics are meaningless, “winning” an argument online does nothing for you, so why are we hell bent on never admitting to shortcomings and doing better? Ego always gets in the way of progress when competition comes before collaboration. If the industry is still truly in its infancy like it is commonly purported to be (ignoring the projected $4.3bn market cap for 2024 - Statista), then why are we so unable to put our differences aside to help others?
Single Point of Failure
Another major red flag of any startup that is doomed to fail, that collegiate esports mirrors, is the tendency to have a single point of failure in an organization. All decisions have to go through one person and there are no checks and balances in place. This almost dictatorship level of control and a refusal to delegate often leads to organizations that will live and die by how willing the person in charge is to sacrifice their entire life for the organization. While having a competent and confident leader in place in an organization is essential to any group, if we function more as a cult of personality and less as a business, we are bound to fail. The same can be said of collegiate esports.
Unfortunately, a problem that collegiate esports, and esports in general, is known for is somehow irresponsible people end up with control of all of the money. We are currently 45 days into 2024 at the time of writing and I have already seen three instances of felony-level embezzlement and fraud in esports, with one of these cases happening in academic esports. And all that we get out of it is an apology post that more or less summarizes to “whoops I did a crime, but I promise I won’t do a crime in the future!”. I know esports loves to brand itself as a home grown, grassroots community that loves to move fast, necessitating a lack of corporate structure and red tape, but please actually hire qualified and competent people if what you are dealing with involves financial and/or legal matters. Just because you are an organization or person who operates almost entirely online doesn’t mean that committing fraud is any less real. We cannot keep accepting that our money disappears into Narnia every time we pay a fee for a league or tournament and the lack of timely payment, or sometimes payment at all, for most everything in esports is something I have been directly questioned about by my administration multiple times. If it gets bad enough that my admin ends up talking with me about this industry being poorly organized, that is concerning.
Bad Business Practices are Normal
I will concede that organizations without a lot of structure can move incredibly quickly, accomplishing a great deal of things in a short amount of time and esports was built on chasing our passions with this sort of vigor. However, the normalization and acceptance of genuinely bad business practices for the sake of convenience and “I don’t know how to do it the right way” in collegiate esports has been drawing raised eyebrows since day one and still does. We cannot keep operating on handshake deals that only exist in writing in some Discord DM buried eons before in your messages with someone. If you were to get a job offer from a legitimate business, say the academic institution you work for, but they don’t give you a contract or more or less anything else that says the details of your agreement, you would call the Department of Labor instantly. So why do we accept this in collegiate esports? It is really frustrating to go to ink a deal with someone with a formal contract and the other miscellaneous articles associated with a business or hiring deal only to be met with “I haven’t ever had to do this before”. This sort of red tape exists for a reason and it’s not just to slow things down. It’s to get proper authorization, understand the commitments all parties make, and to indemnify people in case of the worst. This cannot be a rare occurrence and we need to keep pushing for paperwork to be normalized.
Collegiate esports loves to bank on goodwill, utilizing promises over action and offering nothing more than an IOU for almost everything we do. Almost everyone in collegiate has some sort of story that ends with “and I was doing all of this…as a volunteer” and I myself have done many things at my own expense. My budget when I was running the high school team was genuinely my own credit card and every cent and more of my coaching stipend I was paid went directly back to the team. We so commonly accept working ourselves to the bone now for the promise of potentially being paid in the future that when I directly said I would pay all of my Aurora Series staff for the work they do, some of them sounded surprised. We shouldn’t be ok with being taken advantage of for the sake of doing cool stuff. Know your worth and stand by it.
Furthermore, when it comes to money, collegiate esports loves to do everything digitally, much to the chagrin of university business offices everywhere. I had to fight tooth and nail to get a Paypal account for my team because I know that 99% of tournament organizers would only take payments and distribute funding that way. However, I ran the whole process through my administration and I tell them every time I use it because we cannot just circumvent proper practices with money because we want to. For many organizations in collegiate, they run it barely legally and often track funds and payments with only one person in charge of them, using a Google Form to see who needs to get paid, and without anyone with an accounting background involved.
If Everything is Urgent, Nothing is
When working for or with a larger esports organization beyond your own institution, volunteering your time for a cause you care about, a sense of false urgency creeps into all facets of the work. Volunteers and people who do things out of goodwill are the beating heart behind much of the progress and change in collegiate esports, but they so often get overwhelmed and have their role expanded far beyond what they signed up for. Broadly speaking, job titles tend to mean nothing in collegiate esports and the blending of duties on a moment's notice is a sign of how understaffed we are as an industry and how complacent we have become with this.
We all love bringing students into the fold and teaching them valuable skills in the industry like broadcasting, tournament organization, media, and all the other behind the scenes things that happen beyond just competition. As such, it is incredibly disheartening to see the student staff of most organizations in collegiate have a monumentally high turnover rate and need to be re-trained from scratch almost each semester. The students who step up and make our industry run, whether internally in our own programs or as a part of larger organizations, are invaluable and need to be protected at all costs. However, when their roles and scope of responsibilities are constantly shifting, I can’t blame them for being overwhelmed when trying to balance their own schooling, their own esports program, their student work, and any semblance of a personal life they may have left.
I mentor many students outside of IWU and many of them share this same story, how everything has been billed as urgent to them and they barely have time to breathe and live their own life, leading to stress breakdowns and worse. Hustle culture is constant in our society, but we as staff members in collegiate esports are hired specifically to protect and help our students, so to see so many of the hired adults in the room blind to the open struggles of students is disheartening.
Refusing to be a Part of Academia
Beyond the ways in which collegiate esports culture mirrors that of a struggling startup, we are also often failing our mission of being part of academia as well. It is called “Collegiate Esports” for a reason, and while this industry employs many non-academics, that does not mean that we cannot think and act like academics. We cannot claim to be a part of academia, and reap the structural and financial benefits of being associated with an institution, while patently refusing to actually do most of what academia does. While the culture and practices of academia may not be perfect, and yes there are many ways in which they need to be fixed, it is a genuinely good and functional starting point for esports programs to build up from. We are not here to just do esports, and refusing to go beyond that is doing a disservice to your students, your program, your institution, and the industry as a whole.
What is Your Motivation for Being Here
The first question I ask whenever I talk to someone looking to get into collegiate esports as a staff member, whether they be a student leader, esports professional, or an outsider entirely, is “why do you want to be here?” If their answer isn’t something along the lines of “for the students”, I do my best to counsel them away from leadership roles in collegiate. Working at a university, and especially in a student facing position like being part of an esports program staff, necessitates that people genuinely care about their students beyond just what they can accomplish as a player. The first principal I worked under, Doug Sczinski, would always ask me one question when I proposed a new idea to him: “is it good for the students?” If I could say yes and explain why, he would agree to my idea almost without hesitation. Beliefs like that, that all our decisions need to be rooted in being good for the students, is what carries me forward every day and is why I put the happiness and wellbeing of my students above almost anything else.
I now ask myself “is this good for students beyond just them as an esports player?” whenever I can. Broadly speaking, you don’t get into academia for the pay, and in fact almost every list and survey I can find frankly refuses to discuss pay because it is widely known that educators are not being paid well. Pay is the last thing on anybody's mind because being able to make an impact and help students grow in a crucial time in their life always comes first for any good educator, so to see someone not value the students at all is disheartening.
So why do we still have people in collegiate esports who value winning over the sanity and happiness of their students? Are the results of some random match or potential championship even worth sacrificing everything for? We have seen how poorly this sort of mindset, as well as the mismanagement of player wellbeing, goes in the professional space, most notably with the struggles and failings of Evil Geniuses and their former player Danny (see the extremely well written article here from Arsh Goyal), so why do we allow programs who cycle through players like crazy to still exist? Collegiate esports cannot continue to prop up and celebrate the successes of programs who run on a “winning first” mindset if it comes at the cost of their students. We are actively moving away from our mission as educators, and given we work in academia we are all educators whether we know it or not, by abandoning community building, student support, and advocacy for our students for the sake of prize money and some internet fame.
Caring about students can take many forms too, and many of them aren’t exactly cheery ones. Celebrating successes with students is just as meaningful as being there for struggles, and as the eminent “adult” in the room as a collegiate staff member, it is your job to help students feel at home in your program and institution as best you possibly can. A thing commonly talked about in student affairs administration in higher ed is how impactful just your presence can be. Showing up in campus spaces that are not necessarily your own to support or join in with your students such as sporting events, arts performances, or even just grabbing a meal with them in the campus dining center, can change their perspective greatly and make an impact they may not even realize.
Being present for students also means being there when they struggle though. It is well understood that college can be one of the most stressful times in a student’s life up until that point, and many of them are facing life struggles outside of college that make the pressures of school and competition even worse. When their mental health is at an all time low, students may look for any trusted adult around them to help, and if you make yourself available to them and build trust, that adult can be you. I cannot count the number of late night calls students have made to me to just talk them off a metaphorical ledge. While it’s not my job, I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t. Referring them to resources and helping them where you can and are able to are hidden parts of actually caring about your students that very few things prepare you for, but you have to be ready when they happen.
Lack of Professional Development
Professional development can take on a great many forms, but at its base level, it's a training that helps you be better at your job….that’s it. So the lack of meaningful and useful professional development training and tools in collegiate esports is frankly appalling given how long the space has existed. Some do exist, such as NAECAD and smaller panel series, but the low turnout at these sorts of things is frustrating as well. The people who go to these trainings tend to be very new to the space, and as such training is geared towards them. This leaves a gap where higher level content does not exist and your development as a professional stalls unless you are intrinsically motivated to seek it out or create it yourself.
Professional development in collegiate esports as it currently stands mostly consists of small, one-on-one conversations with people you trust, but this can also create an echo chamber wherein new content and ideas are dismissed for not already being an idea one of the in-crowd has. Meanwhile in academia, the training never stops and there are an abundance of resources at all levels and all contents and you are expected to attend a minimum number of certified professional development seminars per year in order to retain your teaching license. While higher education is a bit less regulated in this regard, professional development is still an expectation and you are seen as a failing professional for not being a participant.
Given the broad lack of professional development specifically for collegiate esports, the next best thing is to train yourself as a higher ed professional. If we as an industry are going to keep hiring folks who don't have an educational background because they know esports (a practice that has its merits), then we need to train them up to be higher education professionals. Below are some that I have been through or heard good things about:
Green Dot training around bystander recognition and intervention.
Any and ALL campus training that is offered to staff.
Most anything NASPA hosts as many of us are in student affairs.
It would also be beneficial to keep up with the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed to understand trends in the space and know more about higher ed as a whole.
Talk with your direct supervisor, they will undoubtedly know many PD opportunities.
Modeling Professionalism
We are the proverbial “adults” in the room for our students, and as such a lot of our behaviors will rub off on them or they will learn lessons from them. We have a responsibility to model professional and productive conduct inside our departments, in our institutions, on social media, and with other colleagues in the industry. Given this, it has been increasingly frustrating to see how collegiate esports has been trending towards more and more unprofessional communication and interactions. Like I mentioned earlier, ego seems to supersede all logical thinking when it comes to social media in esports, and engaging in this teaches students that “hehe funny numbers go up” justifies being unprofessional and overall detrimental to the image of our industry.
No other part of academia struggles this much with a negative social media presence and it is embarrassing to have to explain this week's newest drama to my supervisor because he follows our program and saw more esports drama in his “for you” tab on Twitter. Genuinely, learn from your colleagues in higher education. Have you ever noticed how most folks in higher education do not care one bit about their social media clout and just love what they do? We all set examples for our students in how we talk about other programs privately too, and generally clamping down on language and conversations isn’t limiting free speech, it’s modeling professionalism. You set an example every day for your students, make it a good one.
Leaving Marginalized People by the Wayside
Time and time again I have seen, and been told directly, how students from marginalized populations in terms of the institution, or in terms of esports, feel like a fly on the wall in their own program and it’s disheartening to hear every time. I have directly seen how some staff members in collegiate esports do not pay attention or help students who do not share an identity with them, and that fundamentally fails the mission of academia. Being a member of academia means that you are there to serve the students, all of them, and intentionally failing to do so shows a refusal to understand the mission of higher education.
Students from marginalized communities are not just a problem for the Office of Diversity and Inclusion on your campus, and in fact falls on you as a staff member because those students are under your care. If students are differently abled, it is your responsibility to enable them to succeed with technology and other such measures. I have seen firsthand from another director the impact that getting an adaptive controller can have on the positive outcomes of a student and I genuinely wish every other person in this space thought like they did.
Being in academia means working with everyone, and it is your responsibility to create a welcoming environment by your words and actions in order to do this. Avoid tokenizing students (see my piece on this here), don’t set their value solely on their competitive outcomes (see my piece on this here), and understand how a program's culture comes from you as a staff leader (see my piece on this here). I am not perfect, and I am not trying to claim that my way of doing things is the objective right way to do things. However, I want this whole piece, and especially this section, to spark thought within you about the students you serve and how you can better serve them.
Realism and Enacting Positive Change
I understand that a majority of this piece has been fairly negative and admonishing, but I needed to sufficiently and properly explain the shortcomings of the system(s) we currently have and how collegiate esports falls short of what it proclaims itself to be. This is by no means an exhaustive list (future publications may come expanding on some of these topics), but I want it to spark thoughts and help others understand what they want to change and how. Introspection and a realistic reflection on where we stand now is the only way we can take steps forward for the betterment of the space for the sake of the students that call it home. In the end, it’s all about students, and like my former principal said, the first thought behind everything we do must be if it's good for the students. While the solutions I propose below are not complete and do not fully cover every situation, I want them to be a guiding thought process that can help all of us be realistic about where we are now and how we can elevate ourselves.
Understand Your Core Values
When doing research for this, I did some genuinely searching on what a toxic startup culture looked like (see above sections) and how to remedy it and almost every piece I found directly or indirectly talked about starting with setting core values, understanding them, and living by them. So genuinely, stop for a moment and outline what your core values are right now for yourself, your program and your institution (you can look at your institution’s strategic plan for this generally). Then, make a second list of what you want these values to be if you are not already there. When creating a values list, think about what motivates you as a person and why you even care to be here. I will stop right now and say if it is for the paycheck and not the students, please leave collegiate esports, nobody will miss you. Once you have that, start living that out and modeling that for all students to see.
Talk with your colleagues, your staff, your student leaders, and anyone else who will listen and just talk about what you love about what you do and why you do it. Talking about values you genuinely believe in and follow through on will almost never come off as preachy and generally comes off as just genuine. Culture comes from the top, and so do values, and setting core values that guide your decision making process and everything that you do will make a world of difference.
Burnout is the Only Endgame Right Now
Virtually every collegiate esports director I talk to says that they are burned out. Coaches say that they are burned out, student workers say they are burned out, players say they are burned out, everyone is burned out. Esports is an industry that preys on passion and preaches hustle culture above all else because if you outwork your opponent, you supposedly have a better chance of succeeding. This industry is purpose-built to take advantage of people and burn them out. There is a distinctly non-zero number of staff in collegiate esports who consider self-harm and suicidal ideation every school year because of the stresses of their job, something that is a clear warning sign that this industry is destined to chew up people at a record rate.
A conversation I see people starting to have is “what happens once all the good people leave?” and honestly, I don’t have a good answer. Collegiate esports is seeing a slow but consistent exodus of staff from programs because they are burnt out and can’t take it anymore and finally take that step for themselves, but what happens next? How do we recover our continuity of knowledge, subject matter experts, and people who are willing to work themselves to death for this space if they all leave?
Thoughts like this are never far from my mind as many people I have talked with have all said something along the lines of “I want out of esports now” for burnout related reasons, and I can’t blame them. We all need to be vigilant as a community to help others through burnout as well as spot it in ourselves. We get vacation time, sick time, and sometimes mental health days that we can all use and should be actively using. Balancing work and life is a constant struggle as a working adult, but any steps we can take towards modeling what a healthy balance looks like for our students is a positive one. So please, take some time to outline a reasonable weekly schedule for you, compensating your time when you work late and adjusting your schedule as needed and allowed in order to not work overtime as much as you can. Outline vacation time, plan things for yourself, and do your best to take care of yourself. Burnout is the only endgame right now, and that cannot continue to be the case if we want to continue keeping our veterans around and not scare off our new staff.
Learning From Missteps
One of the hardest things for me to realize as a new educator was that my degree was just a piece of paper. Much of the learning I did in my education classes was under highly idealized situations and applied to very select populations. The reason education at all levels prioritizes experience over degree level in many cases is because experience changes everything. You know your limits, you learn what works and what doesn’t, and you learn more about the population you work with and how you can more effectively work with them. Along with this comes an understanding of where you fall short. Knowing what you don't know is just as important as knowledge in the first place, and being able to ask for help and learn from your mistakes in collegiate esports separates people who are here for the long run from those who just want their name on a liquipedia page somewhere. Your administrators and supervisors are genuinely experienced people who, in all likelihoods, know a lot more than you about a ton of things. While they may not have experience with the specific issues you may be facing in esports, listening to their experience and understanding the comparisons you can make to your own situation will go a very long way.
Truly Embody a Higher Education Professional
Improving as a higher education professional starts with genuine, purposeful introspection. If you want to keep getting into ego-fueled petty slap fights on social media over things that could be better settled with a direct conversation as opposed to garnering public favor, then that's ok. But please, get out of collegiate esports then, you’re an embarrassment as a professional and modeling awful behavior for every student who looks up to you. Being a professional means being able to swallow your pride, your petty sense of justice, and having respectful, professional, and well reasoned conversations with others. If you want to improve the space and are passionate about it, great!! But don’t do that by demeaning and putting down others.
This point will always ring true: higher education professionals do not (broadly speaking) act like how collegiate esports people act like. Furthermore, we cannot chalk that up to “that's esports baby!” and move on. If we are going to embed ourselves as a core part of a student’s experience in their time in higher education, we need to actually act like it. Constant infighting, petty vague tweets, and gatekeeping non-endemics only serves to alienate us from higher education and draw further ire from administration. Actually be a higher education professional and look to your administration and colleagues across campus for what to do and how to get there. You aren’t doing this alone if you don’t want to, but isolating yourself for the sake of being excused from professionalism is one quick way to get there.
Conclusion
Collegiate esports is no longer in the infant stages as we can still claim. Many well established programs are approaching over five years of age, millions in scholarship money is being thrown around, and the travel budget for many teams exceeds my salary. Given all of this, we cannot keep excusing and allowing the industry to retain the culture of a failed startup, fueled by ego and empty promises, and we absolutely have to do better. If we want to be a part of higher education in the long run, we need to get over ourselves, our petting infighting, our refusal to adapt as higher education professionals, our shoddy business practices, all of it. We need to start modeling what being a genuine professional looks like for our colleagues and students and stop accepting the excuse of “esports is still new, we are allowed to be different”. Yes we are different, no we should not be using this to excuse open, felony-level, fraud and other such massive missteps. We can do better and I am deeply frustrated by colleagues in collegiate esports who keep leaning on the old ways for the sake of retaining an ever dwindling semblance of power. If we burn out all the people that truly care about students over profit and praise, who is left then?
