Photo by Matt Marcinkowski
Maryville University’s e-sports team is the 2018 collegiate League of Legends reigning national champion.
It’s 7 o’clock on a Friday evening, and as beer cans are being cracked elsewhere on campus, the starting five of Maryville University’s champion e-sports team sit primed at their stations as they pop caffeinated energy drinks and wait for the preseason match to begin. The game map loads, and then suddenly there’s a chorus of rapid mouse clicks, like pond frogs during a summer sunset. The players wear over-ear headphones with mics and spit punctuated bursts of verbal shorthand. Someone remarks that the lab smells like a less-than-delicious hamburger. A coach slides a window open.
For the next two and a half hours, the team spars with a professional squad from Canada. The game is League of Legends, and the Maryville University Saints are better than good at it: They’re the reigning collegiate champions. A mural outside the lab immortalizes the team, hoisting the trophy last summer in Los Angeles.
Competitive gaming, often called e-sports, has soared in terms of both popularity and prize money in recent years. Professional tourneys fill stadiums and draw millions of online viewers. Elite players can net hundreds of thousands of dollars in a year. Collegiate e-sports is tracking that growth. Nearly 50 U.S. universities have started varsity teams since 2014. Schools in Missouri and Illinois account for about a fourth of them. Maryville founded its e-sports program in the fall of 2015 and became one of the first to offer scholarships for competitive gaming. Missouri Baptist University began offering similar scholarships the next year. Now, other area colleges are hopping on the trend.
Fontbonne University began searching this winter for a coach to launch the school’s first e-sports team this fall. Director of athletics Maria Buckel says the school is committed to meeting the needs and desires of its students: “Sports are no exception to this, and we plan to be a part of the rapidly growing e-sports community.”
Maryville junior Andrew Smith says his school’s status as an early embracer of collegiate e-sports has brought a level of exposure and success that would otherwise be rare for the 7,800-student school: “When else will Maryville be able to say they played Ohio State and crushed them—in anything?”
David Young-Wolff
The 2018 collegiate League of Legends season runs January 15–February 25, followed by several rounds of playoffs. The championship matches are held June 7–10.
Like the other varsity League of Legends players on his team, Smith was recruited by e-sports program director Dan Clerke, who split time between St. Louis and Canada growing up and managed professional e-sports teams before founding Maryville’s program. This year, the program also added a team for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, a first-person shooting game.
When some people hear "e- sports,” Smith says, they associate it with “bros playing Mario Kart and drinking beer in a basement. But they don’t realize that to get as good as we are, it takes, like, 100,000 hours at the game.” During the season, he’ll often play three to five hours per day on weekdays and another 15 to 20 hours over the weekend. The team will also review video of recent matches. Smith, a sports business management major, says that after graduating, he expects to go into the pro gaming industry in some capacity, perhaps on the business or coaching side. But for now, he’s focused on finishing his next two years playing at Maryville—and they have work to do.
Back in the lab, the defending champions have just lost the five-on-five scrimmage, two matches to one. They swivel around in black-and-red ergonomic gaming chairs and face the coach to talk about what went wrong: poor communication, mostly. This was just a preseason scrimmage. There’s still time. They decide to visit a late-night food joint on campus, then return to play another game or two, “just for fun.”
Editor's Note: This article has been updated to reflect that Maryville University now has 7,800 students.
