Creating esports programs with managed network services

Key points:

Esports programs are continuing to grow in popularity, as evidenced by the widespread adoption by schools across the country. In fact, the global esports market is projected to grow to $4.8 billion by 2030. While esports programs are more commonly found on college and university campuses, high schools and even middle schools have started launching programs. 

Participating in esports can help students develop teamwork and leadership skills, and may even lead to scholarship opportunities at certain colleges and universities, according to Scholarships.com. Technology serves as the underlying foundation for any scholastic esports program; however, organizers don’t need to have robust internal IT teams–the expertise of a technology partner can help get students into the esports arena. 

Bringing an esports program to life 

A modern digital infrastructure is the critical foundation for a successful esports program. In the world of online gaming, a few milliseconds can make the difference between a win or loss–with school pride, prizes, and potentially scholarships on the line. Latency or lag time in a school’s internet connection can significantly impact the outcome of a competition. Using a dedicated wired connection can provide optimal reliability and minimize latency. It is also helpful to consider service-level agreements (SLAs) from providers that not only guarantee reliability, but also include strong metrics for performance indicators such as latency. As the esports program grows, the digital infrastructure should be able to easily scale. The increased bandwidth required by adding more players and playing increasingly high-resolution games shouldn’t risk affecting other school operations on the network.  

The Cannon School, a K-12 school in Concord, North Carolina, has created a successful esports program that serves both as a recreational league and a competitive varsity sport. The school opted for a co-managed system where its service partner installed fiber connectivity and manages the security of the network–unified threat management that includes a firewall, advanced malware protection, and intrusion prevention–while Cannon School’s internal IT team manages the content filtering to ensure that students are accessing only age-appropriate websites.  

Approximately 60 students joined Cannon School’s esports program in its first two years of operating and about half compete on the varsity team. Tram Tran, the school’s Manager of Information Technology, credits its popularity to the simple fact that young people love computer gaming. Tran expects the school’s esports program to see a surge in participants over the next several years, and the implemented IT solution can easily scale to address the greater number of users on the system, as well as the ever-increasing data-intensive video games.  

“With our esports program, we are building this pathway from high school to college and then from college to the pros,” Tran said. 

Securing technology as the foundation for esports 

Understanding and implementing the technology foundation necessary may be daunting for schools with limited internal IT resources, but working with an experienced technology partner can help. Technology partners not only offer the expertise and guidance needed for implementing an esports program, but also can provide ongoing support–through managed network services–to ensure that network operations are continually monitored and that competitions have the bandwidth needed to run smoothly.  

According to the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) on the 2023 State of EdTech Leadership, nearly half of respondents (45 percent) felt inadequately staffed to plan and implement new technology. Managed network services can offer schools peace of mind by monitoring for network performance and cybersecurity issues 24/7, freeing IT staff from day-to-day troubleshooting. Beyond supplementing staffing resources, managed services also offer the benefit of no upfront hardware ownership costs, and the fixed, regular expense offers predictability for schools’ budgets.  

Next steps 

For schools thinking about launching an esports program, a conversation with a potential technology solutions partner is a good place to start. An experienced partner can evaluate a school’s current IT network services, help identify what is required, and determine a realistic plan and timeline to establish a program. Schools equipped with a robust digital infrastructure can offer students unique opportunities to compete, collaborate, and thrive in the realm of esports, and leveraging managed network services for help with the technology performance can make things easier for the employees who are focused on the program’s execution and success.