Juggernaut Next Door

Maryville has built the nation’s top program for collegiate video game players. But can it survive an onslaught of rivals?

By Benjamin Simon

Jeremiah Leathe spends more than half of his waking hours playing video games. But sometimes, he just wants to take a break. Sometimes, he wants to get dinner with his teammates.

And when they get dinner, decked out in Maryville sweats and shorts, people always ask the same question. What do you do at Maryville? We play esports, they say.

Play esports? You can get a scholarship for that?

Yes, they get scholarships. They get full rides. Twenty-two of them –– to one of the best esports programs in the entire country. In just eight years, Maryville has developed dynasties in the video games League of Legends and Overwatch, winning four national championships and sending seven players professional. Leathe, 21, competes on the school’s League of Legends team, where he spends seven days a week playing video games.

High school kids, waiters, family, friends –– they envy Leathe. A full scholarship to play video games? That’s amazing. Unbelievable. A dream, a joy, a never-ending rush of happiness and fun.

“I need to tell my kid to play more video games,” they joke.

“I wish I could play 12 hours of games a day,” others say.

“They don’t understand,” Leathe says.

Leathe knows that he’s getting a college degree, something people go into debt for, by playing video games.

“I’m definitely privileged,” he says. But people don’t understand what it takes to compete at this level –– the countless hours staring at a screen, the wrist pain, the messed-up sleep schedule, the constant stress that if you’re not working, someone else is and you’ll lose your spot.

“It’s not about playing 12 hours a day and just having fun,” Leathe says.

It’s about lightning-quick reflexes, down-to-the-second strategy, relentless studying and, above anything else, an uncanny drive to push your brain to the max and rack up more than 10,000 hours of practice –– just to be great at something.

This is not messing around on your computer shooting fake characters. Professional contracts are on the line. A St. Louis-based esports arena is in the works. Each player carries the weight of the scholarship dollars invested by the school.

There’s just one issue: There is no playbook for collegiate esports. Instead, the entire country is looking to Maryville to create it.

Dan Clerke didn’t have some grand plan to become the pioneer of collegiate esports. He just kind of lucked into it years ago, in between Super Smash Bros. games as a sophomore at Missouri University of Science & Technology.

As Clerke struggled with biomechanical engineering, his academic interests waned. He stayed up past midnight, watching League of Legends tournaments and playing more Super Smash. That’s when Clerke and his friends spitballed the idea of creating a professional esports team from scratch.

So that’s what he did. In 2012, Clerke dropped out of college. He got a job at Dierbergs. He DM’d players around the country and assembled a semi-professional team within the video game Call of Duty. He scraped together money to send players to tournaments on Greyhound buses.

Over time, Clerke’s program, Enemy, rose from semi-professional to professional ranks. It expanded into games such as League of Legends, Smite, Gears of War and Counter-Strike

Then something changed. He watched a young man on his team crumble.

This kid had given everything to professional esports. He had been kicked out of his house and hopped from couch to couch because of esports.

When Clerke’s team finally made the professional ranks, the kid bawled his eyes out in relief.

“That was the first time that I’d ever seen stress physically be released from someone’s body,” Clerke says.

The relief didn’t last long. Five months later, Enemy was demoted to a lower division, and the kid was back to sleeping on couches.

Around that time, Clerke had enrolled at Maryville with hopes of completing his degree. President Mark Lombardi learned about Clerke’s success in esports and pitched an idea: Would Clerke create an esports program at the collegiate level?

Continued on pg 16