Many of you may not have heard of Esports or you have but don’t quite understand what it is.
Esports or electronic sports are is organized competitive video gaming, normally it involves teams competing for a cash prize but on a school level the teams are competing for points and championships just like many of the other usual sport genres.
Esports date back to the 1970s where they quickly went from a hobby to an organized professional sport. Today competitive professional gaming also known as Esports is an over one billion dollar industry with many major networks like ESPN, TBS, SyFy, and Telemundo broadcasting Esports events.
In the United States alone there are over 600 colleges and universities that have created Esports teams and have scholarships for Esports.
Esports is becoming more lucrative everyday as prizes for competitions have gone from small trinkets and trophies in the 1970s to prize pools of tens of millions of dollars today.
Muskingum University is not only a competitor in the Esports category since starting their team in 2019, the teams have won multiple national championships in games like Fortnite, Madden, and Rocket League. The team has a dedicated Arena where the stream competitions against other colleges and universities. The Arena located in the Boyd Science Center has 27 high-end gaming machines and provides the team with all the connectivity they need for online gaming in the East Coast Athletic Conference and the Great Lakes Esports Conference.
So far this season the team has competed with and beat Tiffin, Heidelberg, Marietta College, The University of Miami, Sacred Heart, Husson, Suny Plattsburgh, University of Delaware, Ohio Northern, Elmira, Columbia College, and more, with upcoming events against Ohio State, Baldwin Wallace, Cincinnati, and Mount Union.
All of the competitions are streamed live on the Muskingum Universities Twitch channel.
