High-School Star League Brings Gaming As Sport to Teenagers

An anonymous reader points to this "This is an interesting interview with the creators of the High School Star League, an organization dedicated to furthering eSports as a viable hobby and even a career for children and young adults. The HSL has been active in the U.S. for a while but is now making a headway into Europe, where it's finding Counter-Strike is proving much more popular than RTS and MOBA games. There are a significant number of girls getting involved as well — as many as seven percent of competitors. It's a start, right?"

Comments

Kids need school to introduce them to hobbies?

[Anonymous Coward]

Teach them how to have fun? Or is this an effort to kill computer games by associating them with school?

Re:Kids need school to introduce them to hobbies?

[NotDrWho]

No, it's designed to give them false hope of a career in professional gaming--to go along with their false hopes of careers as movie stars, rap/rock stars, fashion icons, and sports legends.

Ah, Just What Schools Were Missing!

[CanHasDIY]

Oh, fantastic - yet another "sport" to distract the future generations of our planet from receiving an actual education.

Maybe it's time we consider creating separate "athletic schools" for the kids who want to be sports-stars, so the rest of the population can focus on, you know, learning important shit.

Re:Ah, Just What Schools Were Missing!

[genner]

Half the curriculum in High School is far from important anyway. At least this is useful to the small segment of the population that can make a living off it.

Re:Ah, Just What Schools Were Missing!

[excelsior_gr]

This is how it is actually done in many european countries. All schools have sport in the curriculum, and although there are competitions between schools etc it is not taken at all seriously. If, however, an individual shows potential, he/she is being forwarded to a sports-school for continuing his studies. In this way, the athlete can also get more professional attention and focus on the sport. Everybody wins.

Re:Viable career?

[Sarten-X]

Is it particularly different from professional physical sports?

A career in any sport is viable as long as there are people willing to pay for someone else to play. Physical sports have a clear lead here, as the fan base is much larger.

Similarly, with so many fans, there's also a greater number of professional players. Percentage-wise, though, there's still only a very small number who make it to the big leagues.

I used to work in a financial company, that had several professional athletes as clients. Most were facing retirement in their early 30's, with huge medical expenses expected later on. Several had second careers lined up before retiring from the sport itself, usually in some tangential field like sports commentary or coaching. After expenses and various kinds of insurance, many of those athletes were looking at modest retirements, having spent much of their high income on preserving what's left of their bodies.

Re:"It's a start, right"

[Sarten-X]

"I played Starcraft tournaments for 5 years" isn't exactly great resume material

Sure it is, but like any other skill it has to be written so it shows what's useful about you. A resume is an account of your abilities, not a biography.

Playing Starcraft competitively for five years could easily be described by saying you "competed professionally in strategy tournaments", and when accompanied by a short description of the primary skills you excelled in (resource management, risk mitigation, public relations), it becomes a very positive credential.

Re:Dumb jock lie

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, I learned of the 'dumb jock' meme from watching Revenge of the Nerds back in the 80s. Throughout my entire life, I have not seen the meme aimed at the abundantly melanin endowed populations, only the low melanin jocks.

Or maybe it isn't so much about racism as a reaction to the actual dumb white jocks (and wannabes) who were bullies to everyone who didn't care so much about sports.

Re:"It's a start, right"

[Sarten-X]

Subtly insightful: All fast-food fries must be timed so enough is available when rushes come in, but there's only a few minutes' window before it cools too much. Resource management and a keen sense of timing are very desirable qualities for a fry cook. Of course, that same skill set is necessary for managing a supply chain. You have to get parts ordered with sufficient lead time so they'll arrive before the production facility runs out, but you also don't want to be wasting storage space (and the associated facilities budget) holding more stock than you need.

My point is that the same skills Starcraft competitions rely on are very close to what certain business sectors need. Perhaps you successfully built your own fan base as a gamer, and now can turn that into a marketing career. Maybe you were able to perfectly balance defenses, and now have a well-trained sense of how to build and evaluate defense-in-depth security. There could be a good career in government work for you. Even if the only thing you were good at was predicting your opponents' strategies, that could be spun into a successful career as an industry analyst.

Don't discount skills just because they were used for something fun.

Title IX Of Course

[Bigbutt]

Title IX of course. Since there aren't as many women and girls in Video Gaming, once they're 'Sports', Title IX can be used to "encourage" girls to play. Then there'll be more girls in Video gaming!

It's just like real sports where Title IX has brought the participation of women up to close what mens participation is (like 45/55 I think was the last stat I read).

I've also heard Title IX is being examined to apply to STEM courses as well to ensure more women are represented in STEM courses.

http://www.dailyherald.com/art...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

[John]