NACE navigating the present and shaping the future of collegiate eSports

The National Association of Collegiate eSports is growing along with the industry, and it will continue to play an important role as the campus activity continues to develop.

As the eSports industry on a professional level explodes, competitive video gaming on college campuses across Canada and the United States are also growing. Leading that growth is NACE.

Headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, NACE has a growing membership that recently expanded to include Boise State and Georgia State and now sits at 41. Executive Director Michael Brooks believes that the association will continue to add members because of what it can offer to varsity programs and the gamers involved.

“We provide a ton of information, in terms of business intelligence that we have collected from our member schools,” said Brooks. “We aggregate that information from several sources, compartmentalize it and distribute it to schools that are interested in starting varsity eSports programs. We connect administrators at schools who are in the space so they can share ideas. Our organization was founded by six of the seven varsity eSports programs in existence last July.”

In drafting the by-laws and constitution for the association, the founding committees took what they determined to be the best aspects of the same regulations found in similar documents utilized by the NAIA and NCAA.

“We looked at those documents and removed the aspects that there were disagreements on whether they would fit in eSports or would be overly restrictive for an industry that is very much in its infancy,” Brooks explained. “We incorporated the rest as it makes sense across North America for collegiate eSports. What we ended up focusing on is academic standards and transfer rules. Even on transfer rules, it is very basic. We allow students to transfer with a simple notification between the five seasons of eligibility.”

A few programs have been able to secure some low-level sponsorships, but as the eSports industry continues to expand as a whole, that trend is likely to hit the college level as well. NACE is prepared to offer assistance when revenue streams grow for its membership.

“External revenue is pretty minimal right now, and it’s pretty much limited to in-kind sponsorships providing equipment” Brooks elaborated. “But in terms of sponsorships, there is a huge amount of flexibility. There are certain categories which are restricted like alcohol and tobacco. In terms of students winning additional scholarship money outside of our structure, there are discussions within our organization about that ongoing. As of right now, we default to the institutions’ policies with what to do with those funds. The split is pretty sizable over whether those dollars go to the student or to the program. I’m not certain which way that will go. We don’t have any language governing players profiting off their own image, likeness and names at this point because we don’t have a consensus on it.”

As the NCAA has started kicking the tires on eSports, Brooks thinks that it would create many challenges for the organization.

“The hurdles that I know are coming, which keep me up at night, we have the advantage of building this thing from the ground up,” Brooks stated. “They are a 100-year-old organization which is a membership association. Each institution has one vote, so for any systemic change that they would want to implement, they would have to almost create something entirely separate. They would have to convince the majority of their leadership to allow it. We have enough of a challenge trying to convince administrators that eSports is a thing. There is a mountain of issues with the current NCAA structure when it comes to eSports. I would love to see them come in with their resources, but them coming in heavy-handed has the potential to end collegiate eSports.”

“For example, the NCAA has a more strict interpretation of Title IX compliance than the Department of Education does,” Brooks went on. “We leave the definition of eSports up for the Department of Education and the judicial system. As long as the resources are there equally available to everyone, you’re compliant. If you define eSports as a sport and put it under NCAA jurisdiction, given current participation levels in regards to gender, if a school is going to add a varsity eSports program that way, it has one of three choices. It can close a tradition male athletic program to bring resources into equivalence, it could add a traditional female sports program or just eliminate the eSports program.

I don’t think it’s hard to guess which of those options is most likely. Right now the NCAA has no jurisdiction and the schools have built the programs specifically to keep the NCAA out. These programs aren’t ran through the athletic department, the gamers aren’t defined as athletes on campus and the scholarships don’t come from the athletics funds. I can’t see what the NCAA could possibly bring to the table that isn’t already provided by the game publishers, the individual schools and by us.”

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The biggest evolutionary steps in collegiate eSports are yet to come, and as the different varsity programs across North America try to adapt, a unifying structure that will act to protect their interests will be crucial to successful adaptation. NACE is best-suited to provide that structure, for both schools and students.