There's no doubt E-Sports is a growing trend. But now a local institution of higher learning is powering up, and taking it to the next level.
"Oh, my little kids are four and seven, and they beat me at like Clash Royale. And Brawl Stars. So I'm sitting there like, I gotta practice!" Bryant and Stratton Director of E-Sports Quan Nguyen says.
Quan Nguyen sees the explosion of E-Sports, first hand.
"Once you get older, your fast, Twitch muscles slow down and you can't do as much anymore, right?" Nguyen says. "But I cheat. I tell them, hey, you know what? If you beat me, no more video games for tonight."
As the Director of E-Sports at Bryant and Stratton College, scholarships are attracting high-level talent.
"I think it was last year, when a 16-year-old won $3 million playing Fortnite," Nguyen says. "And then people starting hearing, hey, they came to school, are they were like, hey, you give scholarships to go to school, to play video games? Then they started realizing like, oh wow."
"Seeing like how far this facility has actually come, it's like you walk in here and you're just like, oh like I wanna like play video games. Like, it's somewhere you actually want to be," Caitlynn Kirsch says.
"So if you're child is very good at video games, don't just push it off," Nguyen says. "Help them expand it. And let them know that it's not just video games. It's also growing a career. Building skill sets that you can use in work, if you don't become a professional gamer. You can use teamwork, flexibility, timing, you know, action planning, in your everyday work."
And if you're skeptical on if it's a sport, or the benefits of it, that's changing too.
"Because before, you played video games, people were like why are you playing video games? But now, you can play video games, and get an education," Nguyen says. "So I think it's great. And I think it shows how invested our administration is, to E-Sports."
"My brothers, when I was a kid, I would always want to be with my brothers," Kirsch says. "Just because like, I felt so cool. Like they were older and stuff. And like, so I would try to get into video games with them and like it. And it ended up having me actually like them and being really competitive with it," Kirsch says.
Some day, Bryant and Stratton College hopes to host the state tournament and major E-Sports events.
