Hear me out: Varsity eSports

At the beginning of March, Colorado Mesa University announced that beginning next fall the athletic department will be adding women’s wrestling to be competing at the Division II level.

That gives the university three new varsity sports added in the last three years (beach volleyball and triathlon were the other two).

Despite already having 28 NCAA sports at CMU, there is always the opportunity to expand. With the new addition, it is a fair question to ask what the next varsity sport added should be.

Now, without taking the easy way out of choosing something like men’s beach volleyball or making men’s triathlon not a club, I decided to bring in a different sport that is gaining a lot of traction around the world: eSports.

For those of you that don’t know what eSports is, the simple answer is video games but much bigger. Teams and individuals will come together to compete in large tournaments around the world to see who the best gamer is. Contestants will play on anything from personal computers to Xbox and PlayStation.

Games like League of Legends, Overwatch and Fortnite have become worldwide sensations over the last year. So much so companies like ESPN have started broadcasting their own eSports coverage.

ESports has its own category on their website, along with tournament event coverage on the prime ESPN channels with commentary.

Now, some would argue that eSports is not even a sport let alone a varsity sport a Division I or II level.

However, even if that is your view on the subject, the rest of the world begs to differ. This is the real deal and people are paying a lot of money to witness it.

And that is one of the biggest reasons why I chose this as the next varsity sport to slip into CMU. It is a money generator. Games like Overwatch and League of Legends have millions of fans around the world, and people love to watch those that are really good at it.

Combined with the fact that there isn’t a lot of equipment to buy and most players have their systems/controller preferences coming in, a majority of the money needed would be to send them to their three to four tournaments a semester.

On top of that, CMU has shown that they want to be ahead of the curve when it comes to athletics. Not many schools offer our newest sports. So, I expect that to continue moving forward.

Not many schools have eSports, which means that if someone wants to compete at a collegiate level in eSports they don’t have many choices.

CMU would be one of them. Which again, brings in more money. It helps too that the university already has an eSports club on campus, so they have some interest already.

While it isn’t all about money, money is the biggest factor in any decision like this. So, moving forward this is the sport I would bet on to be at CMU next.

I don’t expect it to be any time soon, but at the same time, I said that just before we got women’s wrestling.