ESPORTS

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At first, Clerke said no. But then he thought about the sobbing player.

In that moment, Clerke realized that there was no program for someone on the verge of professional levels but not quite there yet. There was no development ground. There was no way to play esports and make a living –– outside of the 50 people who made the professional level.

“[Collegiate esports] is the future,” he says. “We need to create a better structure for the path to pro and create a better structure for post-play.”

In 2015, Clerke returned to Maryville’s president with a deal. Fund some scholarships for his program and he would deliver a national championship.

And with that, Clerke developed one of the first esports collegiate programs in the entire country. The League of Legends team steamrolled the competition, though few schools were participating at the time, going 40-0 and winning a national championship in its first year.

Since then, the number of collegiate esports programs has skyrocketed. Robert Morris University Illinois formed the nation’s very first varsity esports program in 2014. By 2020, 451 schools were competing in Riot’s League of Legends –– and Esports Foundry, a counseling service, estimates the number of esports varsity programs is even higher. There are nearly $16 million esports scholarships provided to more than 5,000 students every year, according to the National Association of Collegiate Esports.

For colleges, it can help them attract students, create extracurricular programming and, ultimately, develop courses that students want to take. Boise State University, for example, now offers classes dedicated to the esports field.

“It’s a cross-disciplinary subject. There’s a lot of different specialties within it,” says Brett Shelton, who studies educational technology at Boise State University.

He ticks off a number of careers in esports: Event planning, marketing, technology, shoutcasting and data analytics. “I haven’t even mentioned player,” he says.

For smaller private schools, like Maryville, investing heavily in esports isn’t about hopping on the newest fad. It’s about money, enrollment and survival. It’s their one chance to compete with Mich- igan or UCLA. The United States has more than 4,000 colleges and universities, and most are fighting for students and their tens of thousands of tuition dollars. Nearly 25 percent of private colleges operate at a deficit, according to Moody’s Investors Service — which will only worsen as an enrollment cliff looms due to the declining birthrate.

At Maryville, Clerke says, esports bring in revenue from partnerships (such as Under Armour and McDonald’s), as well as attributed revenue from marketing. Some students attend the school because of esports, hoping to make the team.

Look at photos of Maryville online, and it seems like a new campus. It’s tucked away off Interstate 64, squeezed between corporate buildings in Town and Country. There are no castle-like study halls or ornate sculptures. Some buildings are a bland tan brick. Others are made almost entirely of glass. One dorm is located in a former hotel. Half the campus is a parking lot.

But walk around the school, and you’ll quickly see it is old. Banners honor its 150-year anniversary. Founded in 1872 by the Society of the Sacred Heart, Maryville initially served underprivileged youth and women in south city. Through the years, the school shifted, over and over again — once a junior college, then a fouryear school, then a liberal arts college and now a private university, with graduate programs in nursing and business.

In recent years, Maryville made another shift, opting for a technology-centric approach. The school has increased online courses, provided every student with an iPad and added degrees in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and blockchain. Apple has named it a Distinguished School for innovation three times.

“It’s hard to [change your school] if you’re Penn State,” says Barbara Mistick, CEO of the National Asso- ciation of Independent Colleges and Universities. “It’s so big that you can’t infuse that across the core curriculum. … That’s someplace where small institutions are uniquely positioned because they can be adaptable and flexible.”

The focus on technology has changed the university. Plenty of private schools have seen their enrollment numbers plummet. But not Maryville. From 2008 to 2018, Maryville was the second fastest-growing private institution in the country, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. It hasn’t slowed down. In 2017, the school had 2,292 undergraduates. In 2022, enrollment hit 5,711. All of this growth coincided with something else: an esports team. It didn’t just keep Maryville afloat. It put Maryville on the national map.

Leathe sits at his computer, nearby are a Starbucks coffee and an unopened can of Gingerbread Snap’d Mountain Dew. He’s tired. He stayed up until 3:30 a.m. playing video games. “The gamer schedule,” he calls it. He didn’t want to stay up that late, but he kept losing and losing in League of Legends games –– and he wouldn’t quit.

“Every single professional and competitive gamer is playing 12 to 14 hours a day,” Leathe says. “So if you’re not doing that, then you’re never going to be better than them.”

He fell asleep at 3:30 a.m., but he returned seven hours later, at 10:30 a.m.

When the Maryville esports program first started, players practiced in the computer lab and, later, in a dorm. Now, Clerke’s two teams have their own facility. From the outside, it looks like a shed with a garage door. But inside, it is a gamers’ treasure chest. There’s a common space with couches, chairs, TVs, a Wii console, a kitchen, nearly 20 used water jugs and the outline of a basketball court in front of a mini-hoop. There are two closed-off rooms ––one for the Overwatch team and one for League of Legends –– where each player has a station with two monitors and gamer rolling chairs with the letter M on the back. The rooms don’t have any windows, and sometimes, they smell like a hot, stuffy locker room.

Although the summer and fall semesters are more relaxed, the League of Legends team currently competes in college and amateur leagues before Riot’s championship tournament, taking place from late April to early May. (Be- cause there is no NCAA, students can win prize money as well.) Now, the teams are playing sunrise to sunset nonstop, seven days a week, with scrimmages, practices, film review and weekend tournaments.

“I don’t have a life right now,” says assistant director Andrew Smith. “I’m sure most of us don’t have a life right now.”

In League of Legends, each team has five characters, with the objective of destroying each other’s base –– like Capture the Flag. The game offers more than 160 characters, each with their own traits, weapons and special abilities. But before games, opposing teams can ban characters –– forcing everyone to adjust on the fly.

You can’t just ransack your enemy’s base. It takes around 30 minutes of plowing away through the forestry map, fighting for position, attacking dragons and breaking mini-bases. League is far from an individual game. Each player has a designated position, from “top” to “jungle” to “support,” and they all work together to cover the map.

But the rules of League of Legends aren’t stagnant like sports. Every few weeks, the game updates –– and the abilities of those players change, called “patching.” You get used to one character, and poof, that character loses a special ability.

“Imagine if the NFL suddenly announced next year that rushing touchdowns were worth only five points, or if MLB expanded the strike zone for left-handed pitchers,” ESPN reporter Mina Kimes wrote in a 2015 profile of the Lebron James of League of Legends, Faker.

Before games, Maryville spends 20 minutes on strategy. The head coach, TJ LaMarca, who is a current student at the school, compiles a color-coded scouting report on every team, detailing previous games and what characters players like to choose. They’ll run over plays and vulnerable parts of the map to attack.

On this Saturday in early March, the team is loose. They’re playing against Contingent Esports, an amateur team ranked 32nd in the tournament. Maryville is ranked first –– and they don’t expect to lose. Players watch weightlifting videos and Korean League of Legends streams with crumpled-up dining hall receipts and scrunched-up Monster cans on their desks. Smith reminds some of the players that they must run a half marathon if his hometown Sacramento Kings makes the NBA playoffs. They clown Leathe for his “blue-ass jeans” because no gamers wear jeans. Most sport Maryville-themed sweats and slides. They want to know why in the world he would wear jeans.

“What’s your theory?” Leathe asks.

“You need to do laundry,” another player says, correctly.

But when the game starts, the mood changes. “All right boys. Let’s not underestimate them. They came here to play,” one of them says

The room turns into a thunderstorm of clicking, forearms flexing with every click. The players shout in a foreign language, their words jumbled, darting back and forth over headsets.

“Careful at mid.”

“They’re basing, guys.”

“Should we burn at the base?”

“We should burn at the base.”

“OK let’s burn.”

“They have digs though.”

“We should send it guys.”

“Burn it. Burn it.”

Twenty minutes, they’re trailing –– 10 kills to 9 kills.

Then Leathe comes alive.

Now that he’s playing for real, Leathe’s calves hug the edge of his chair, his back perfectly straight and his eyes glued to the screen. Midway through the game, a scrum breaks out near the bottom of the map between all 10 players. It’s chaos. People are sending red fireballs, dragons are howling and characters are transforming into a purple forcefield. Leathe is caught right in the middle.

He erupts with a purple circle that hits people like an earthquake. One, two, three, four characters are ganging up on him. You can barely follow what’s going on –– there are so many colors and fireballs and people and green beams.

All of a sudden, things don’t look good. A flying fireball hits Leathe square in the chest, knocking his health down to 50 percent. And now they’re zeroed in on him. One player from the opposing team teleports right on top of him.

But somehow Leathe sees it all. He backtracks from the mess with ease, sliding toward an open area, sending an ice arrow right in the chest of one character, and then another, and then another, and then another, perfectly accurate. He fires so fast, and so efficiently, that the opposing characters barely have a chance to respond. Within seconds, Leathe has wiped out four characters from the other team.

“Maryville University are going to slaughter Contingent Esports!” the announcer yells over the Twitch stream.

Jordan Ousley, the media director, falls back in his chair, unable to believe it.

“Jerry’s so good,” he whispers.

During the 2022 League of Legends championship tournament, a random school kept winning. Its name was Converse College, a liberal arts school in Spartanburg, South Carolina, with 804 undergraduates.

Ranked as the 22nd seed, Converse knocked off the 11-seed Bethany College. Then the 6-seed Arizona State. Then the 3-seed Michigan State to reach the semifinals.

And there was one player carrying the team, one player who kept the small school competing with the big guns –– a player without a hint of facial hair and short, floppy, messy black hair, who scored absurd stat lines, like 12 kills to 2 deaths. His gamertag was ScaryJerry, but his real name was Jeremiah Leathe.

Everyone knew about Leathe. Clerke admired him from afar, toying with the idea of inviting him to Maryville. Then he heard Leathe’s postgame interview.

Usually these interviews are boring. But not with Leathe. He flexed and flaunted and let everyone know that Converse wasn’t some random school.

“[Leathe’s] like, ‘No, we can beat anybody here,’” Clerke remembers. “‘That’s no problem. It was expected for me. I expect to be here. I expect to win this.’”

“I was like, ‘Damn,’” Clerke says, “‘this kid does not care. I need that.’”

That same weekend, Clerke invited Leathe to dinner and did something rare: He offered Leathe a full ride and roster position on the spot. Leathe didn’t think long before accepting.

“Everyone knew that Maryville was the place to be for League,” Leathe says. “And I never imagined I could even make it.”

Clerke has seen a shift in the program during Leathe’s first year. Leathe arrived two months before school started to practice. He hasn’t taken a day off since Christmas. He’s extremely serious about his craft, measuring his caffeine down to the milligram so it hits during peak playing hours. Even his breaks are scheduled for 10-minute blocks, where his goofy side comes out and he’ll migrate to the mini-hoop court, betting anyone and everyone $2, shooting step-back jumpers and flying through the air to dunk.

He’s competitive with everything. The first time they went rock climbing, Leathe cut open his hand in the middle of a climb. But he kept climbing, blood on his hand.

“Jerry has been an instant culture change here,” Clerke says. “Our team [has] a lot more energy.”

Leathe says he wasn’t always this way. “I had a lot of confidence issues.”

Leathe was born in Argentina before his family moved to Mexico and settled down in suburban Chicago. After graduating from high school, he worked with his dad in the insurance field for more than a year. He felt bored and aimless.

He started reading self-help books, like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He realized he didn’t just want to work a nineto-five. He wanted to be great at something.

He chose video games.

“I’m gonna try really hard at this game, and if I become successful with it, then that’ll prove that I can do anything I set my

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