UTD's ESPORTS PROGRAM NEEDS MORE PERMANENT SUPPORT

After its explosive success and growth in a short time the esports program needs more permanent staff in order to sustain current operations.

The UTD Esports team has outgrown the administration’s current support, and needs another permanent staff member to keep the program’s momentum going or it risks losing the progress the program has made so far.

The interim period since inaugural coach Greg Adler left the program has both shown off the highest that the esports program could achieve and exposed the flaws with the current administrative situation. As an example, the Overwatch team brought on former pro coach Chris “Bani” Benell and freshman players such as Abraham “P3tal” Khan, giving them an edge that pushed the team to top 4 in the nation. The social media team and broadcast team also expanded to some degree, but this reveals some of the flaws in the program. As it has rapidly expanded into 4 different games and multiple domains of esports beyond mere competition, UTD Esports has quickly outpaced both the passion driving the program forward and the support that the administration is willing to give it.

The esports industry was historically driven by passionate and underpaid people striving for a dream. This manifested into unpaid horror stories, like Dignitas paying interns in mousepads for months of work. Unfortunately, collegiate esports doesn’t fall far from the tree. It can be argued that like many other collegiate clubs, an esports program doesn’t necessarily have to pay students for doing some minor work or social media promotion. Officers at smaller clubs may dedicate 5-10 hours weekly to arranging meetings, activities, and managing a small budget funded by bake sales. However, this type of view grossly underestimates the current scale of the program, and likely was a contributing factor to the University’s disastrous decision to list a director’s job as a “head coach” position. Perpetuating this view only leads to the continuation of one of esports’ worst habits, and it will eventually burn out the most passionate people in a program.

In the absence of permanent paid employees by the university, UTD Esports has fleshed itself out with a program that is almost entirely student run. Teams needed coaches to coach teams, so volunteers were found. Then team managers were needed to arrange practices and tournament signups, alongside more coaches to help the existing ones in a growing program. More students joined the program. Real esports teams have social media, so a social media manager manifested, and so on and so forth until there’s nearly 20 students filling roles that are paid positions elsewhere, from coaching to broadcast and more. The key students of the program can spend up to 40 hours a week keeping the program running to the standard they’ve set, because they want to see this program succeed. But it’s not sustainable. Students are ephemeral by nature. They graduate, get new jobs and some just become burnt out.

This is especially obvious with the social media team, which this semester was a revolving door. Long-time social lead and CS major Hector Mavrakis graduates this year, and did a lot of work on graphics, social media, and sponsorships – often far exceeding his logged 20 hours a week. He did so much on the team that his position is breaking into three different roles upon his graduation, all of which need to be filled for the social media team to continue running at tip top shape. And while early in the semester there were plenty of people willing to help, like with all clubs, membership tends to die down over time. At this time, only one full time video editor and one full time social media person remain.

Critically, for an esports team, social media can be a key aspect of funding. Every single esports team, collegiate, amateur, or professional, runs on sponsors. And differently from sponsors for traditional athletics, they don’t just want their names plastered on the jerseys or arena walls. Esports sponsors love deliverables: social media content that features their product, direct promotion in the beginning or end of a video, or even just featuring their logo in exchange for funding the content piece.

“There could potentially be a little more support and hours given so that we can bring on more students … for the marketing team so that we can offer more deliverables. More deliverables means that we can also have more content for sponsors,” Mavrakis said. “Just take creative and socials as a potential money maker, it’s been proven with universities such as UCI that esports can 100% be profitable.” UTD Esports has a lot of problems to address. But all change must be made incrementally. So, even though the name “head coach” is wholly inaccurate to the duties of the position, and even though students will have to pick up the slack in the day to day operations of the teams since, as a public institution, UTD can’t just throw money at what we’d like, I propose one solution. Within a year, the administration should hire on at least one other permanent staff member to maintain a constant presence for the non-player related parts of the program: the social media, broadcast and content creator teams. Because social media and broadcast are so key to providing marketable deliverables, potentially multi-year sponsorships should not be left up to students that leave on a semesterly basis. Having a permanent esports media coordinator on deck to oversee the funding and creation of deliverables – which can be made by available student staff – would greatly stabilize the program. A big complaint from the program right now is that there is not enough money to pay for equipment, staff work, and more. A summarization of the admin response is best said as “this is the worst time to be asking for money.” But having somebody on staff focused on coordinating the social media and broadcast team can cascade into securing sponsorships and funding for the program and free up the new “head coach” to focus on managing the teams. Then, the UTD administration doesn’t have to inject hundreds of thousands of dollars to meet program demands and the program itself can become self-sustaining.

This video, for instance, is plastered with Alienware’s logo in the start and end, since the company is one Team Liquid’s main sponsors.

The members of the esports program have already proven that success can be achieved here. From smashing the collegiate smash scene to garnering over 90,000 views on roster announcements alone, the program is running strong on the fuel of student passion. But now UTD needs to strike while the iron is hot, or risk losing the program as burnt out students leave behind a dying flame.