“My heart is racing!” At HUE Fest, esports gets intense

The Harrisburg University team clubhouse still had that new PC smell. The million-dollar room — done up in team colors orange and burgundy — had opened just two days before, complete with a video wall and rows of OMEN by HP gaming PCs. It debuted as a practice facility and lounge for Harrisburg's varsity esports team just in time for the school to host the first-ever HUE Festival — the Harrisburg University Esports Festival — a two-day team-videogame tournament and music festival on the first weekend of fall. The invitational drew 32 teams from 21 schools across the country.

In their high-tech new practice room, the starting six players of the Harrisburg University Storm's Overwatch team paced nervously and strategized with their coaches. They'd just won their Saturday morning semifinal against a Bellevue University team from Nebraska and were headed for the finals, an afternoon showdown in a 550-seat auditorium, to be streamed live to the world via Twitch, against formidable Maryville University.

"We know we're the underdogs," said Adam Stanley, a 24-year-old from St. Louis (gamertag: Masq). He had executed a thrilling series of moves in the semifinals, as an Overwatch hero named Genji, wiping out almost the entire opposing team on the game's Temple of Anubis map.

"We've scrimmed with Maryville before, but that was a long time ago," Stanley said. "We have some information on what they like to do. They have some information on what we like to do. But there's a lot of mind warfare. There's been times when we've known they were watching us, and we played things we don’t normally play. And they probably know it. And they've probably done the same to us."

Out in the hallway, Daniel Clerke, coach of the opposing Maryville squad, was confident. "Our players know that we're the best team in this tournament," he said.

Harrisburg University didn’t even exist when Stanley and Clerke were born. The school opened for students in 2005, aiming to provide affordable STEM education to less advantaged students in Central Pennsylvania. The school has grown from 73 students that first year to nearly 7,000 now, and along the way it began thinking about varsity sports.

"We had no teams, no mascots, no anything," says Harrisburg president Eric Darr. "We toyed with the idea of athletics, knowing our students are not typical dirt-sport athletes."

Esports — competitive gaming — was a natural fit. In the fall of 2017, Darr says, "through Twitch, Reddit, Discord, we put out a call that we're building a team. ‘Come one, come all. Full scholarships on the line!’" Around 500 people engaged in online tryouts playing Overwatch and League of Legends, and 36 were flown to Harrisburg . The school awarded 16 scholarships (which are internally funded, according to the school), to students ages 18 to 27. Eligibility requirements, set by schools and the National Association of Collegiate Esports (NACE), are looser than NCAA rules; players must maintain minimum GPAs, but some have professional experience.

Harrisburg University's team, with separate units competing in Overwatch and League of Legends, became the Storm, complete with stylish uniforms and a mascot: an angry red tornado holding yellow lightning bolts.

NACE says it has 98 member schools, up from just six in 2016. Many are smaller institutions like Harrisburg, Maryville and Bellevue. "The cost to start an esports program are a fraction of traditional athletics," says Michael Brooks, NACE executive director. "So it's really a chance for a school to plant their flag in uncharted territory. The schools that create the opportunities first are the ones that get first-mover advantage, to establish their brands on a global scale."

College players can segue into new professional leagues, and the mushrooming industry offers careers beyond playing.

"We're going to give people interested in esports the skills to work in the field, whether that's behind the camera, at a switching desk, capturing desk, creating new mods for those games," says Harrisburg University professor Charles Palmer. The school is exploring esports management programs for those who'd like to manage teams and start leagues. President Darr notes "there will be an arms race" to build esports arenas, among schools as well as cities as they compete to attract students, professional franchises and recreational players.

For HUE Fest, Harrisburg University partnered with the neighboring Whitaker Center for the Science and Arts, a venue that typically draws families to its hands-on science museum and older audiences to concerts by Baby Boomer music acts. But the venue’s CEO, Ted Black, has gone after millennials and Gen Z by making esports part of the public entertainment mix. On a stage where audiences on other days might see Don McLean or David Crosby, 12 OMEN X PCS were lined up for the Overwatch finals. Two announcers from the professional Overwatch League began live commentary.

Backstage, Christian Gillespie sat at his own PC and geared up to create the game feed for the audience, switching in real-time among the 12 player screens and "spectator" mode. He was the official "observer," like a live TV producer calling camera angles, but working alone. "I just need to use my game sense, and listen to what the gamecasters are saying," he explained. In the production booth, technicians readied to feed the gamecast to a live audience that would top 4,000 watching the action streaming on Twitch.

The Overwatch finals lasted two hours, then three. Harrisburg shocked Maryville by winning the first set In the best-of-three. After three and a half grueling hours, the squads were dead even. The crowd, watching Gillespie's feed on a giant screen, cheered whenever the home team rallied. But Maryville prevailed.

"My heart was racing. I thought I was going to have to go to the hospital," Maryville coach Clerke said afterward. "When we saw the 99 go to 100, and we won, my brain wasn’t working. It was pure adrenalin and emotion. We had guys crying."

Still to come were the finals for League of Legends teams (Columbia College would defeat Harrisburg University). Outside on Market Street, attendees sampled the food trucks, the nu metal band Alien Ant Farm tucked into some dissonant guitar chords, and festivities carried on into the night.

Go inside the OMEN House, where gaming is a full-time job.