How can you be involved in your college esports, and how can you break into the Esports industry? Today, we'll be covering those topics while talking to Kevin. Kevin, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Kevin, tell us about your role as an account manager at Twitch and how Twitch is furthering the collegiate esports scene. So, as an account manager at Twitch, I have different types of responsibilities depending on the type of partners that we work with. So, the first being the universities that we have partnerships with. So, making sure that they have all the tools and resources made available to them, making sure they understand Twitch as a whole. So, really just educating them about our platform and getting them ready for 2017 and 2018, and beyond. For example, like educating them about extensions and what great powers it has to be the future of live streaming. Yeah. I think getting students to really play around, and even creating their own extensions one day, would be really awesome. I think with extensions, it really adds a whole layer of interactions and real life changing different types of magical stuff that happened on stream. I think right now, one of my favorites ones I think students love are the Hearthstone extensions, where you can actually hover over your game, Hearthstone game and actually look at the cards on stream without opening a parse on itself. So, you can watch someone. Someone? Yeah. You can watch someone and learn Hearthstone cards while you're watching them. Love to see in the future where students are creating extensions for the games that they like to play. Whether it's overlay for stats, whether it's actual ways to drop loot boxes in a Battle Royale type of game. I think having students equipped with extensions is really awesome. So, that's one layer. The second layer would be working with their collegiate esports tournament organizers. So, we work with thousands of thousands of universities through our tournament organizers where they host these national wide battles. Sorry, national wide tournaments for their country. So, we have our friends in UEM, University Esports Masters. They are really great example because they united over six different countries in Europe from Portugal, Spain, Italy, England, France, Germany, Great. Playing and one of the things that we did, was we made sure that each of them have all the resources that we have available to them. So, we worked with them and getting their live event all setup and getting ready to go. Here in North America, we have TESPA, NACE, AVGL, and CSL. We've worked with them making sure they have what they need as well and just making sure, as account manager, the role is to be a support player, basically. It's out of field support, basically. So, for us further in the industry is really about education. The Twitch student program, it doesn't drink the Twitch Kool-Aid. We really just want to provide information out there, for these administrators who's starting these programs and for students who want to start these programs or for the start collegiate organizers that want to create these large-scale tournaments, we want to provide education and introduce them to the right people. So, focusing a little bit more on you personally, you've broken to the esports into a pretty unconventional way. Could you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah. So, I first started my career when I was 18, when I first heard about a Microsoft apprentice programs called Map. I grew up in Bellevue, Washington. So, it's like 20 minutes from the Microsoft headquarters. After I got in, I was a marketing apprentice for the year. So, I worked on enterprise partner group. From there, I stayed on for a couple more years doing yearly contract rules from anywhere doing global finance to marketing and education, and taking these different experiences together and then I found out that gaming esports was really important to me. I think it was 2012 but I watched the Season Two, League of Legend: Finals. It was Taipei Assassins versus Azubu Frost and that's where I was like, "Wow. This could be a really, really cool thing to get into. How do I get involved in that?" I've always been a gamer, played World of Warcraft, played Moonscape, played Raytheon, all sorts of different types of games growing up. I didn't know that you can actually work in this industry and I felt like I missed out. Seeing these people in these big stages I'm like, "There's people that make this happen." From there, I was very curious about what it took to get there.What I ended up doing was, you know what I wanted to get really good at League. So, I played all the way up to like Diamond One level and then created my own challenger team, got to like top 14 challenger and then went on to be a coach at the University of Washington. We had our own League of Legends team for the university League of Legend Tournament. Then from there, I became an analyst for TSM, Team Solo Mid, where we lost to CLG. I was on Season Five where we lost to Counter Logic Gaming in the final. So, after that, I started the Washington Gaming Association at the University of Washington. What that was, it was an umbrella of unified gaming association that oversaw the growth of gaming at the University of Washington. I think when I started it, we had like 12,13 different gaming clubs in the organization anywhere from League of Legends to Virtual Reality game development. So, we had a wide variety of opportunities where any student can come in and say, "Hey, I like gaming. Oh, have you heard of the League, have you heard Virtual Reality, have you heard Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm?" Whatever the student wanted to play, there was a club for them. Okay. If there wasn't a club for them and there was enough students that wanted to get behind it, they can create their own club. I think the recent one we added was like Dota Two or something. Okay. So, that was the purpose and I guess from there, it's really hard to do collegiate esports and not run into Mark Candella who goes by Garvey. So, after a year of knowing him, he asked me to join his new program. So, I joined in April this year. That's awesome. So, what obstacles do students face as they try and implement esports at their own colleges? For students, I see lot of university clubs. When I say clubs, I mean not supported or officially backed by the university. Okay. So, when I started at University of Washington Gaming Association, it wasn't backed by the club where, sorry, backed by the school. So, a lot of these schools are now looking to create these holistic programs that UCI has that Robert Morris University has and provided scholarship, have a dedicated space to game. Those are the some of the struggles that these students are facing is that, they have such a large amount of students that want this space or want some official program because they look around, they go, "Wow, why can't we have that?" They go to the university and say, "How do we get that?" The problem that they run into there is, knowing who to talk to and creating the right pitch to get them further in the bureaucracy. The university system works in different tiers, either talk to Student Life, you can talk Athletics, can talk to this and this and this, and I think that's really confusing because students don't know where the first step is. So, I really advise if they reach out to me, is to start talking to their Student Life because Student Life allows, if the programs hosted under Student Life, it's holistic, meaning that they can pull in more different types of resources whether they want different departments to come in and help out here and there or Athletics to get involved. They can be more agile if it's at Student Life. Okay. For the administrators coming in, meaning that they want to start a program themselves, which is from top to bottom. There are challenges by themselves while they're going at it. A lot of these administrators are doing this full time, they have their working IT, they're an athletics director and they're taking this on a special work, which is awesome for them to do this. I think it's really exciting. But, the challenge for them is bandwidth and it's daunting to start a esports program and not knowing what the full scope of the landscape is. For you, Charlie, you've worked in the space for so long, you understand where this is going and stuff, they need these experts at these universities. So, what I think is challenging for the administrators is the education side. Understanding the scope, the landscape, and where we're headed. So, one of the things that we do to help them with that as we get on a call with them and we make sure they understand everything they need to know, answer any questions they may have, and if we don't know these questions, we introduce them to all the other program directors that have created these programs. I think, again, we're the support players, so, it's us saying, "Hey, you're not in it alone." Definitely, make sure all your spelling and grammar is correct. I've reviewed pitches before where spelling, grammar was off. Definitely, when more of the 30,000 foot view I think a perfect pitch for these university administrators is, first is talk about what is esports? Kind of breaking down, pull in the big data of all the reports and stuff right, try them the full on scope to what is esports to what is college esports? So, what's going on in collegiate globally? I think we're now like 60 varsity programs that have a scholarship and that publicly announced that they have a scholarship. Then, what is university at your campus? What are you doing on campus? What events have you thrown? What's going on? Show them what your student bodies like, show them that you know this is local. So, you start from global then shrink it down to collegiate and then going down to university. So, put a picture like that and if they ever need help with one and two, well we help them with that too. That's awesome. So, going into a little bit of a far reaching question. But, where do you seek collegiate esports in the next five years, let's say inside of the country? In the next five years, I hope to see hundreds of different universities now ranging anywhere from the Ivy Leagues to private institutions to come in and create these varsity programs. I think it's really exciting. I think in five years it's going be even, I say that we're that pre-mainstream, I mean that's really exciting we start. In the next year, I think the snowball would tip and start rolling downhill from there because I think put all this momentum coming in with University of Utah announcing one this year and the great work that UCI is doing, more students will get paid to play for your teams, I think that's the best answer. More students get paid to play video games, more students are streaming more than ever, more students are being active and curious about the industry, and more students are working in this industry. I think in the five years, we're going to see a lot of students that graduate, that can actually go, "Hey, I can actually work in this industry." I think my favorite thing is probably saying parents being more surprised about scholarships and things like that. Absolutely. I met parents that go to these tournaments and they're just blown away, and they went from naysayers to believers. There, okay. So, let's go even farther reaching, you said that snowball is going to be tipping down. Where do we think esports could be in the next 15 years, let's say inside of the country? In the next 15 years, I think with the recent announcement with the Golden Guardians, where they actually announce a whole team at the Golden State Warriors Stadium during the halftime show or something. Yeah. That was super cool. I think with that happening this year in 2017, at the end of 2017, in the next 15 years, I think we're going to be playing in these massive stadiums. I see esports becoming more global than ever, I think with the new tech that's coming out all across the board, I think more people will have access to these tools, I think regions like in Southeast Asia, Australia, will all come online more and actually start creating structures around the world. I think with US, being ahead of the curve on the varsity structure, in the next 15 years, we're going to see universities from all around the world creating these programs. So, I think collegiate esports globally will be a widely accepted, accept that program that is going to be institutionalized. The best answer is esports will be institutionalized in universities all around the world. That's awesome. So, talking a little bit more about the collegiate students and universities here in the United States. How can college students at UCI, for example, get involved in esports or at other colleges? Also a follow-up, what about students who are commuters or students who can't come to campus too often, how can they get involved in esports also? Yeah, if you're a UCI student, you just walk into your arena like you have a temple here, so that's really nice. So, if you're not like UCI and you have a gaming club which a majority of the students have at their campus. If you don't have a gaming club, you have pulled together your bunch of your students, your peers and your friends who play games and create one together, and start doing those monthly meet ourselves by weekly meet up some host the land for invite that will come out. But, a lot of these universities now have gaming clubs where there's quarterly meet ups, quarterly events, and ways to get involved. So, the best thing for students come in, is actually not knowing exactly what they want to do because the most of the stuff I won't learned all my life was just not knowing what I wanted to do and just did stuff. I worked and I did stuff, and learn stuff, and then I found out what I didn't like. That is as valuable as knowing what you like because we don't like, you're young, so you can figure out what you want to do after. So, if you don't like graphic design after trying it out at your club, you know that throwing events make you more happy, then you can go and do events or you can go into streaming. So, these universities are this is your canvas to like do whatever you want with it. For online students is the same way, it's a digital community being gamers, there's all these group tournaments online they can participate in. You can call in during these meetings as well and really get involved there or we can do the work remotely. When I was an analyst at TSM, I was doing the work remotely, I wasn't living at the gaming house, but I was a University of Washington student while being analysts at TSM. So, a lot of these roles in esports are surprisingly, there's a lot of remote level work. But, I'm going have to say like, if you want to really get involved as an issue, you're going to have to save up money and go to these events and meet the people there. There's nothing better than going out to like Packs, TwitchCon, or E3, or whatever, and meeting these people yourself, eating dinner, chatting, and sharing stories about your life, and listening to others. I think end of the day, true esports experience has to do with building your network. Kevin, thanks for being here. I appreciate your time. Thank you so much for having me, Chad. Collegiate esports is a rapidly growing industry and Kevin is a great example for somebody who worked up his way through his college and then started to work at Twitch. So, for you guys there's plenty of different ways to get involved in both Collegiate esports and the esports industry as a whole.
