Transforming video gamers into college athletes

Sitting in a darkened room, staring at a computer screen for hours is now on par with two-a-days and free-throw drills, at least at some colleges.

League of Legends, the online multi-player gaming sensation is now recognized as an official sport at Robert Morris University in Chicago. A sport complete with varsity and junior varsity teams, a specially outfitted training room, and scholarships for its top recruits.

That’s right, scholarships.

Gamer Youngbin Chun went from typical teenage video game junkie to one of Robert Morris’ 35 inaugural scholarship recipients. The 20-year-old leads a varsity team of five players at the small private university.

“I never thought in my life I’m going to get a scholarship playing a game,” said Chung, who struggled to succeed in high school due to his obsession with video games. Now Chung studies computer networking on a nearly $15,000-a-year athletic scholarship, playing League of Legends for the university.

The teams train in a classroom redesigned as a state-of-the-art gaming center. Room-darkening blinds, an expansive video screen, headsets, special lighting, and an array of dazzling game equipment provide a customized training and competition space rival to many traditional athletic facilities.

“You have to have that discipline to show up to practice every day and to be committed and dedicated so that you’re able to be competitive in your environment,” said Robert Morris Associate Athletic Director Kurt Melcher, “I think that’s the educational take-out, whether it’s League of Legends or our men’s basketball team.”

The world of e-sports has come a long way since Atari’s 1980 Space Invaders Championship. Today’s competitions routinely draw tens of thousands of spectators as gamers compete for millions of dollars in prize money. Professional gamers with handles like “Puppey,” “Flash,” and “Fatal1ty” pull in generous, six-figure incomes. A pastime once regarded as reserved for slackers and anti-social teens now treats its top players like megastars.

Robert Morris is not the only college competing in e-sports. An organization called Collegiate Starleague runs the national championship for three games—StarCraft II, Dota2, and League of Legends. While only 20 schools participated in its initial tournament in 2009, 550 schools now compete, including Harvard and MIT. College-level play is not currently sponsored by the NCAA, so student players can compete for private earnings or accept sponsorship deals.

The traditional sports world has not yet fully opened its arms to the new phenomenon. E-sports tournaments are often day-long affairs, so televising them would either tie up hours of valuable network time or require a delayed “highlight” show. Spectators already view tournaments in real time, either in sold-out stadiums or through the sophisticated capacity of modern online video streaming. TV coverage might simply be redundant and unnecessary.

ESPN has dabbled in e-sports coverage, but network President John Skipper recently declared video games unworthy of its attention.

“It’s not a sport,” he said at a conference in New York. “It’s a competition, right? I mean, chess is a competition, and checkers is a competition. … I’m mostly interested in doing real sports.”

But Skipper acknowledged e-sports won’t easily be sidelined: “You can’t really ignore it.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.