welcome to the secrets of college planning i'm your host anthony uva and today we're going to get some insight into e sports it's a new thing at the college level and my guest today is then clarke he's the director of e sports  school so i started out actually in engineering school at missouri yes and he went there for about two years was kind of like finding my passion at that point decided engineering wasn't for me so i ended up at maple university doing international business i'm actually graduating this month so this will be my last week of week a college oh wow well congratulations and thank you thank you so let's go back into high school first before we get into what you're doing courses and high school for college credit i probably started choosing what school i was going to after my junior year ok well i know a lot of people start thinking about it and their software year  sometimes but for me it was just kind of like it took me a little while for me to figure out where i was going in life i really didn't know what my passion was it was just kind of like all right i have to go to school so let's try to kind of try to think of something that i'll go into but yeah i mean i mean like i really didn't find out what i what i wanted to do until i was probably twenty years old wow ok so no once you get to college what's the college life experience for you so far so i'm just going to skip probably go straight to mary ball so maybe i started as a commuter i stayed on campus for a little bit but i mean i think the college life is kind of really a tool for people to figure out who they are as a person because you kind of get away from mom  and dad you have to be responsible with your time and it's really like there's no one there to hold your hand every day so yeah that's basically what it was for me was kind of really finding who i was making friends maybe relationship stuff like that  so now let's get into e sports so how does one go from graduating college to becoming the director of the sports so actually if you want to talk about like the beginning of the sports for me it was actually in high school i was a professional player i played called for on the p c and then went to engine school decide i don't like it and then i swapped over to business school so i was like you know what sports is really what i'm good at so i'm going to try to pursue that this is back when he sports didn't really wasn't really blowing up yet so i just kind of stuck with and i kind of i got kind of lucky with blue but yeah when it comes to the director of your sports i started my own professional team i was working at a deli making eight dollars an hour and i funded my own organization for a little bit and my first i created made the biggest league in the sports so it was kind of like a like a cinderella story the team that was supposed to make it making it and maryborough kind of saw that they were like all right we have this kid on campus who is kind of one of the leaders in this new big thing let's get let's get him in office so i sat down with dr markham bartie who's the president of mary bell and he gave me a small scholarship for having a kind of like an entrepreneurial like spirit and what i was doing and he was just like what do we have to do to get this on campus and i basically laid it out for him and and now i'm here with a lot of this is kind of like just like the stars aligning honestly so so i'm not going to like tell everyone that this is the right way to go about it but if you really want to get into your sports it's got to get you got to kind of get involved in the scene start at the bottom do a lot of like independent work it's not really something where you send your resume and you get hired you really have to kind of prove to people that you know what you're doing because it's so new it's not it's not really something where there's a precedent for what degree is going to be the best for this field or like things of that of that nature so you really got to kind of study the games and make sure that people know that you're affluent with with what you're talking no get into the sport itself what is it because there's a lot of people out there that don't know you know the sport is so a lot of people like to compare you sports to sports like is it a sport is it not a sport it's basically competitive videogames i like to like throw that whole argument at the window it's not a sport i think it's a competition that is presented through a digital medium make a video games it's you don't really have to like too much physical activity to to become an obsolete but it's more of a cerebral game it's a it's an i q game so you're really trying to outsmart your opponent the average you sports athlete let's take one game for example eagle adams i'll get into that later but they they take and six or more sources of information while talking to their five teammates in the game and they make calculated decisions every every couple seconds like how much damage can do to this guy how much damage can he do to me how far away can i be from this guy while being safe i can still pump damage into him how far away is my teammate from me these are just little examples and they make calculated button presses based on those mathematical equations that they're that they're making in their hand and how do you know bridge how do you win the game it depends on which game so so the sports is synonymous the word sports and in the sense that each videogame has its own eastport ok whereas like each sport has its own sport like hockey baseball soccer and sport would be like legal legends call of duty points or like counter strike defend the other team from playing the bomb or plant the bomb and the bomb so each game kind of has its own condition in the sense that sports has its own went to this is no how many how many universities these sports as there are a lot of universities that are involved so when mabel got involved we were probably one of four and this was two years ago and this year i think the number is upwards of sixty universities that have farsi programs wow so this is something that's really trending right now i know the end they had and their yearly meeting i know that you sports was like at the top of their list of priorities to talk about so this is something that's really really taking off this is something i think it's like really really important for the industry as well because what a lot of these players that are going pro are like eighteen years old they're deciding whether to go pro or to go to school which is really really unhealthy in my opinion so i think college being involved and allowing these players to kind of get a degree while holding their skills as it is and adds a lot of stability to the scene whereas a player can get picked up by a protein when they're eighteen and then get dropped six months later and then where's where's he go from there like a lot of so is it structured at the college level how does it all work so at the college level not every eastport is structured for collegiate yet ok so so the two major games i'm looking at right now are league of legends and overwatch so when you think of those two games they're there they're created by two different video game developers right games and blizzard activision and those two developers kind of put together the framework is there's four hundred to six hundred schools not every school has to be far cities where a team to compete you can have a club on campus that people will go to two to compete in for this tournament and they play round robins and then they kind of wind down the level of teams that move on to the next stage until january where you enter like a final round robin and there's a playoff bracket that the top eight teams go to l a to play in their studio for the national championship and how long does a national championship specifically you're basically working throughout your whole school year so while like a basketball player might be like i can focus on my studies so i'm going to set up my schedule this semester tab my rigorous classes so that i can have an easier schedule this semester when well for example again you're going to practice x amount of days a week right for one to two hours maybe three or four depending on how rigorous school was whereas in the sports athletes really have to practice eight to ten hours a day to be at the top level so so  a lot of it is like in between games figuring out what you want to simon you're going to work on stuff like that but it's really just like a constant juggling act between time management holy cow you know so how does one get involved and they just join is there a entrance fee how does it all work at the school level or the player level the school level on the player level so at the school level there's really not an entrance fee to join we're trying to figure out what unsuitable i want to do with the team up for the tournament and i go to the tournament it's pretty simple at the player level at maryville dive into our infrastructure we have our city players which i recruit myself and then we have homegrown teams on campus that anybody can up they come to the sports lab that we like to call it and they say that they're interested and and participating and they are awarded a smaller scholarship for participation so there's two different there's two different levels that you can kind of get involved then it's the farseer level that's recruited for and they get the high level scholarships and then there's the participation level now those maryville do it differently than everybody else because you're saying you you're getting recruited you you find people to get recruited  all schools get recruited or some schools just let people join and that's it so their club schools which just have like legal legends clubs on campus and they they're just homegrown so kids on campus that want to play together they sign up for the tournament see how far they get and there's varsity schools like maryville where they actually actively recruit and provide scholarships the players have school support in terms of space and the funding and everything like that so  i do like to think that we do it differently simply because i have a professional background in the space right a lot of the other directors are athletic directors i think at the school so they're still trying to figure out the sports some of the kids are just  they haven't worked at the pro level so i really able to identify talent at a higher level than all these people i think and a lot of them really focus on the game whereas i pick up players that i think will benefit personally as opposed to seeing them as the method of winning the national championship so these players these players that i pick up are people that i think stand to gain the most out of a college education so they're bubble players that are potentially going pro but aren't quite there yet maybe people who have already gone pro and now want to supplement their professional experience with an education so when people come to me if i'm really really focused on getting that degree i really want to make sure that if i'm picking up a player they're going to be here for four years and i'm going to get to see them walk across the stage and get a degree in their hands so know how do you how do you work in the academic into it because you said eight to ten hours a day yeah most of their practicing at night yeah so first of all when like so every summer i go through like a recruitment process am i going to recruit more players how are we going to have players returning who's leaving us to go pro etc et and then once once i get my roster for this year i get them a call and i tell them that i want all of their schedules to be done by a certain time during the day if someone's doing like a candidate for example and they need to have labs that night then we kind of figure out what days we're not going to be practicing as a team so that they are able to go to law to make sure that gets done and so what that usually results in is players being done by four or pm and then practice starts around six and it goes till nine pm and that's team practice outside of team practice they have individual practice where that the hone their skills and i call it cardio where they get into solo games and they practice individually on things that they need to work on which he put on the board so well say like so and so needs to work on different aspects of the game this isn't going to be english like well like they need to work on their work control their vision game then you work on these characters etc et a test coming up that's really big i'll cancel practice so that i'll say everyone this is a catchup day to catch up on your work etc etc so it's really like i really need to be in constant communication with the players and understand what their schedule is for the next couple weeks so i'm able to kind of form the practice schedule around that because again at maryville the school does come first we really take pride in the g p a aspect of our program core fact majority of the kids that come into the program have really had really g p s in the past like two zero to two five and then after they cut come to marry well with with this program supplementing their love for the game which was inhibiting their schools their schooling before we actually have a three five and above average four for the players in the program testing congratulations and then yeah so so now the tournament so the tournament on the weekends are they are night yeah so this is another scheduling thing so generally the are matches on sunday around one or two pm so it doesn't really conflict with school but again if if one of the one of the teams knows that a player has a task that they need to study for a monday or something like that we're able to kind of contact their quarter nater and tell them hey can we reschedule for this date because we really want to make sure that this player has time to kind of focus on what they're doing this this week coming up great now with the sixty universities out there do you play all sixty of them over a whole year span those you know only play certain teams certain schools so really different depends on how the pools or the groups shake out so they they have like we're divided into different regions north south east west that's how they divide the large number of schools and then within that they divide those schools and pool so like north one north to south one south to and each one of those pools a lot of sixteen's so that point it's like a round robin where you play the different schools so it really just depends on how that shakes to you know a kid going in just for let's say english or something like that yes so i would say as a whole for like the club levels teams there is a larger number of people that are in stem stem courses i just think that video games are more popular among those people than other prefer groups but for maryville and like of our c program like like us we have a really diverse group of kids so we have a couple kids going for business we have a couple kids going for chemistry we have a kid that's trying to become a cop so he's doing he's doing wall and i mean it's just it's really a mixed bag with us but but in terms of like the national level i would say that there's a larger amount of stuff stem course people that are getting it done other than out of things so no give me what what a student does when they graduate from college with e sports background do they go professional is there something to do in the video gaming world that had it what happens after they graduate so so the industry is so new that's really kind of being defined right now the foul you of someone that's gone just gone to school  like specializing in any sports or like business or or sports business compared to someone that's just worked in the space and hasn't been the college so i think and the next couple years we're going to see a lot more kids being hired at a college that i've had  is sports farci program for my players specifically it's hard to tell your parents was hard to tell my parents that we're going to kind of be focusing on video games for the rest of my life and i mean so a lot of the kids that come to marry vell they come to marry vo because it makes their parents feel more comfortable about what they're planning on doing with video games so some of these kids are on my team are pro full but they're not really going to attempt to go pro until they graduate college so they have to the degree to fall back on so and i'm on the other token some of my players have already played at the professional level and they're going to school because they're not with their career yet because the average career kind of ends pretty early any sports compared to professional sports how much can you make doing the sports so i so i had a player on my for professional team this year that was making thirty thousand a month and  going into january he would have been making fifty thousand dollars a month so that's kind of like i would say the top twenty five percentile of salaries some of the players in the industry make two to three million dollars a year while that's top now what's you know what's the average that actually somebody can actually do so an average player in north america can make anywhere from eighty thousand dollars to one hundred twenty thousand dollars a year which really isn't that bad if you're an eighteen year old nineteen year old kid  but it but the time frame is short great they can do this for the rest of their life yeah that's another thing so this is again this is a really new industry so as of right now  you're best when you're sixteen to eighteen years old and i think i really think that this is like a matter of opinion really has been proven a lot of people like to say it's because your reaction time is so nice to be so on point that  millisecond makes all the difference and as you kind of grow up kind of declines when you're when you're in your twenty's but i don't really agree with that i really think that it's more of a factor of someone growing up so when you're sixteen eighteen you're really don't have very much responsibility so they're going to high school right when you hit eighteen then you're moving out of your house you get a girlfriend you start to think about your life in the future so like i think that it's a matter of  big boy things get in the way so you can really focus as much time on video games and then you're get your game played to clients but i think now that people salaries are raising to the level of they are and that university is kind of embracing this i think that we're going to see the average career age to we've already filled out staples center we felt at madison square garden we felt out there can the center we filled out the olympic arena in china and some of the broadcast so the legalizers world championship had thirty two million viewers w hich is more than i think every sporting event except for the super bowl it's a truly global sport on the scope of something like soccer it's something that really just takes a computer an internet connection so there's really not much that you need to go you don't need it you don't need to take your kid to the soccer field the fact is every day you're going to pay for pads to play hockey it's something that literally everybody can do and it's also there's really not a gender gap and it because it's not like a physical ability thing so females can compete on the same team as males so this is really a truly international thing and you get it when you really think about it video games have really only been around for thirty years or so and it was only really a matter of time before it became competitive and as technology keeps becoming more advanced what fear are and everything like that who who's to say that like fifty years from now we won't be able to put our v o r had sat and we're going to be able to calculate arm muscle muscular ability and our physical ability into the game and play basketball on the moon or something no no one really knows how big this is going to get but i just think as technology advances it's going to become much much bigger so so what do you do after you graduate i'm going to continue what i'm doing what i'm doing i've become a staff member at maryville and i'm going to continue running my professional team so i don't know where i'm going and up we're currently doing a funding round right now to buy into a twenty million dollar franchise league so i could end up and i'm sure i could end up in l a i could end up in salt college want to get into e sports what do you want to tell them so outside e sports my advice to someone that's in high school is like unless you're like super duper passionate about something don't force yourself to go into something that you're really on sure of i would say take general courses your first couple semesters of college so that you don't get in to situation like me where i did two years of engineering and i was like you know what i really don't like it and i had to kind of start over on my degree so so to really take time to figure out what you want to do in life and then when it comes to east ports i would tell parents that it might not be as unhealthy as you think to let your kids play more video games but at the same time it's not like anybody can become an e sports athletes it's not like you can go out on a basketball court and shoot free throws all day and then join the m b a you have to really like practice and a cerebral way and the right way so it's not like everybody can become any sports out but at the same time this is becoming a much healthier career it's becoming a lot more stable so it's really not that far out there that you can you can make