 Welcome to the wide world of eSports, a show devoted to all things eSports. I'm your host, Catherine Norr. Today, my guest is Bethany Piles, and our topic is eSports Player Development and Insight Look. Bethany is Player Development Specialist for United States eSports Federation. Welcome Bethany. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. All right. So tell us about United States eSports Federation. Yeah, of course. So the U.S. eSports Federation, it's our U.S. national team. So we have a team of about five different titles, all stacked between male and female, and we're competing in the IESF. So this is the International eSports Federation, the league that we all play in. All right. What titles? We have Dota 2, CS2, we have eFootball, Mobile Legends, PUBG Mobile, and that's it. We've got a great stack this year. It changes every year, but we're excited. We have a Mobile Legends female team and a CS2 female team as well. All right. And how many teams altogether? Five teams, and so we'll have seven total between those two split. Not all are obviously team games. Our eFootball just represents one athlete. Oh, okay. You know, eFootball, that sounds kind of interesting. Tell us about that. How is there eFootball with one athlete? Yeah, I mean, it's similar to sort of those fighting genre games, right? So you're going head-to-head with one other player likely. So you're fully in control of a whole team yourself, but you're playing as one individual across the field. So soccer games, similar to Madden or NBA 2K, sometimes where you really duke in and out between you and one other person is really interesting. Okay. And that's not American football, correct? Correct. Usually it can be, but yeah, soccer, American football is part of the teams that are eligible that you can pick, but obviously a lot of the European teams are much stronger, so they usually get picked in those titles. All right. And what countries are you going against? Oh, hundreds, actually. So there are hundreds of countries that are part of the IESF, so it ranges every year. It's different, but you know, we have a huge pool of competition. A lot of these titles are actually not the most popular titles in the US. You may have heard, you know, Dota 2, for example, or PUBG Mobile, things like that, that are like, you don't hear about too much around here. Even eFootball. It's the international scale at what we're playing. These titles are top tier, and they're some of the more popular, but we don't pick these titles. The league does, so we play whatever they're most interested in and what's going on around the world. So super interesting, but we play against hundreds of different countries. You know, when I think about the mobile games, I think of Asia and Africa. So is that kind of the reason why the mobile games are part of this? Yeah, I think so. I mean, mobile games are super accessible. That's first off. A lot of them are free, and whether or not you have a PC setup or access to the newest console, it doesn't really matter. If you have a phone that can handle some of these games, you're eligible to play and gain some skills. So I think that's part of the reason mobile gaming is so massive, but obviously, you know, countries in Asia and Africa, like you mentioned, have done a lot to market these games and make them super popular as well. But yeah, massive audience for amateur and professional teams. What are the age range of the players that are playing on those teams? Yeah, some of them can be as young as 16. We prefer for the US side that they're 18 and up. And this is just out of maturity. And we can talk about this, I'm sure more as we get into just player development. But typically your mindset for an international stage is a little bit stronger, 18 and up. So that's typically what we would pick from. I mean, these are folks that are competing in Brazil and Romania. And these countries that a lot of folks, they've never left the country before. So even just the pressures that you have to deal with and logistics getting overseas, things like that, we really need some really strong fortitude in these players. So we typically like to go 18 and up. And are the players actually traveling to those countries? Or are they only or are they doing partly mobile, I mean, online events? So they start off the recruitment. There's several combines that we have them play through to even become part of our team. They have to sort of prove themselves. And that is typically all virtual. Sometimes there are live events that we will use to use as qualifiers for ourselves. So we have a committee of people that look for players and are scouting our teams. And sometimes these are live events, but oftentimes are virtual. After that phase, once you've been recruited, you're going live. We are flying you to Brazil and you're going to have to go sit on a stage against other people and an audience. So it's a whole different world than sitting at your computer desk with your friends on Discord. It's very a very real, very tangible experience to travel with the USEF team. OK, shifting to player development. What what is meant by player development? You know, I think player development is anything that is nurturing or enhancing the skills of players to make sure that they're excelling as competitive athletes. So that that's a big bucket of things. And, you know, a lot of teams will have different conceptual coaches or mentors as part of development in different areas. But holistically, you're looking at the whole player and how can they excel? And that could be in game. It could also be out of game. But overall, it's nurturing that player to excel to their best. You know, it's interesting because this is my last show with an actual live guest before we kind of end our Think Tech Hawaii recording shows. And throughout the, you know, interviewing a hundred or more guests, I've talked to so many people that had something to do with player development, like Sykesensei, GamerDoc, you know, people that are providing products that help players. So are those and also people that help with the kind of exercise and fitness of players and coaches who have actually advocated fitness of players. So does that all play a part? Absolutely. That's what I mean. There are these concepts that go beyond just a player getting better. There's so many layers to that. And every player really sort of deserves something of that. So meaning it could be health and wellness that they're struggling with and they need some more guidance with it could be their mental resilience. It could be instilling this championship mindset in them. They often typically trigger over failures, for example. It could be their technical skill or or actually their tactical knowledge. So something in game that they need to get better at learning and understanding. So there's a whole array and you're right. So there's folks that will specialize in some of these for health and nutrition, for example, for physical wellness and also those coaches that are super hyper aware of meta shifts and things changing in games, patch notes, etc. to help the players really start to understand where they fit in. So it's super layered in my role. I'm overseeing all of that to make sure it's all happening. But I'm often using other people to help facilitate that. So I'll bring in a health and wellness specialist to do an orientation with players, for example. Or like likewise during our travels, we often invite a coach. So I don't act as their coach in these roles. I don't know all these titles to an expertise. So I'd rather bring in someone that was is that knows the players, understands them and also has some experience on these stages that can help them in high pressure situations. So there's a lot of sort of key aspects in my role is to find those key people and make sure the development is happening throughout the whole series. What about choking? I would think that that is the most challenging aspect for player development. And I would think, too, that these players may not realize that they might choke on an international stage until they've actually done it. What do you think about that? I think you're right. When you get on a stage like that and you're representing your country, it's different. It hits different. You're going to go through scenarios that you didn't ever go through at home with your friends again. So there are some things that we like to do in order to help prepare players mentally for these things. But again, you don't really know what it's going to feel like until you're in the middle of it. It's trying to help sort of build in and still some of those things that will help them cope. Mental resiliency is sort of the one thing that I'll probably keep saying in Championship Mindset, which is what happens when you choke? What happens when something bad happens? How do you recover? Recovery is a big part of being in traditional sports, but also especially in esports, when there's so many factors happening. If you think of one thing that's choking or not working or you feel like it's failing in the game, if you get caught up on that, then it's a total decline. You've got to stay in some sort of flow state with yourself and talk yourself out of some of those sort of failures or errors that are happening. But choking is a very real thing and it often has a really slippery decline if you don't catch it and are prepared to deal with it in a moment. Sure. And so when the players are playing a tournament or a game in a foreign country or whatever, is there a warm up phase? Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of prep that goes into it. So once teams are considered and they've been selected, it's instant go time, workshops, boot camping, trying to build that synergy and also a lot of mental building, like I was mentioning earlier. If players don't already do some of those things, those things are added into that regiment ahead of some of these world competitions, primarily because of the stressors that are associated with going international, again, playing in front of these audiences. It's different. You're going to feel tired and jet lag likely. You're going to have to fight some things that you probably aren't fighting at home. But there's a lot of analysis review looking at the opponent's vods as well, trying to strategize. So there's a whole lot that sort of comes together in the weeks before, but warming up is one of those things that it doesn't happen in an instant. It really builds over time. So the more you put into it, the more practice and repetition that we're getting out of these teams prior to competing, the better that they'll play ahead of all of that. So I just returned from Munich, Germany, from Munich to Hawaii. And I'm still dealing with jet lag. How do you help the players deal with jet lag, especially when they're in time zones that are kind of upside down? No, absolutely. And this is something I deal with personally as well. I'm traveling just as much as them. I'm in California. And so I typically, there's different days happening when I'm traveling sometimes. I'm going back in the future, then I'm coming back into the present. So it does mess with you and you have to be pretty aware of your circadian rhythm. I like to teach players to just really help their body. So anything physical and good sleep, the proper nutrition, things like that, all of that will help you bounce back. So the more trash you fill with your body and the more you sort of lean into that feeling, the worse it's going to be for you. So getting up and going and doing something, oftentimes going out for a walk, trying to fight the urge to sleep and make sure that your rhythm is back for those days. We also try to add a lot of buffer days. So we're not flying right to the stage, for example. We'd like to get there a few days ahead of time to let their bodies adjust to everything from the water to the food, to being on the airplane, to who goes, what happened in immigration along the way, right? So we take in a lot of these factors just to make sure that they're feeling healthy and can at least reset their systems in time for play. But it is absolutely something to consider and try to help them with along the way. But a lot of it is is taking care of their bodies physically. In gymnastics, when the U.S. select their national team for the Olympics, a lot goes into how much international experience does that player have? Does that go into your selection of those who play? Yeah, it is a factor. We use a rubric for our committee to end up selecting. So we're all on the same page of what we're looking for and what we're deeming appropriate. And one of those things is past experience. Do they have experience on large stages? If not abroad already, but do they have an international sort of ability and capability built into them that they've proven? Because we have had issues where folks just don't feel ready and they have a terrible experience, honestly. It's a really big struggle for them. So now we like to highlight the fact that you will be international. You should have some proven experience, not just competitively, not just playing well, but actually managing some of the stress. We do like to bring players back as well. So if you've competed with us in the past and you've proven yourself to be able to do all of these things, that's a huge accolade. We want you to return. We'd love alumni to come back. So that's part of our process as well, who is proving themselves. And if they haven't already, how capable are they to be able to step into this role and represent us well too? Character comes into play a little bit here as well, which is can they represent us on stage and on social media, things like that? Have they proven themselves as a holistically easy to work with player that can add value here? And so do you have alternates that fly that may not compete if there isn't a need for an alternate? In some cases, yes. There are some parts of the league that we're actually able to switch up our rosters throughout the year as well. So for example, in Rio, Rio is a big one for us because if we place in Rio, then we're qualified to continue on. Within that sort of that timeframe between Rio and the finals, we can actually change up rosters in between those two times. That's a lot of time. There's a few months in between. And for esports, keeping a team together for a whole year, let alone six to eight months is actually pretty hard to do. People get burnt out. There's a lot of personal life things that come up, right? So if you're not part of an organization and being paid a salary to do this, it can be difficult. So yes, we'll typically have a leading roster, one that we'd hope to qualify with. And if changes need to be made, we're always ready to bring in some other folks as well. What about communication between players? Is that an important, like communication and relationships between players on a team? Is that part of player development? Yeah, absolutely. This is also part of our recruitment. We tend to look for players too that have a great track record of treating people well. We don't want people to come in and cause a whole lot of issues. We don't need anybody who's a drama queen part of all of this either. We really like people that are effective communicators. They know their role. They know where they add value. I actually like to call this mindful communication, which is, are you as mindful of the game as you are? How you talk to your coach? How you talk to your teammate? How you talk to your management staff? Because everybody in this org is really sort of trying to push everybody forward between whether you're behind the scenes or you're actually playing a game. Everything has to work together, from the logistics getting set, from you just sitting in your headshot and your bio on time, all of those things matter to make sure that we can have a great end product. So it's a lot more these days than just having pure good mechanics and skill. That is oversaturated. We need folks that are ready to play and can communicate with us and work well on a team. Do you have to, do you screen for drug use? Or are there, tell us about the, what kind of drug issues might come about in the international competition? Yeah, just like you would imagine any sort of high stakes traditional sport, there are anti-doping policies built into the IESF League. So as soon as folks are onboarded with us and selected, they go through an orientation with us first before they're in any sort of bootcamping or anything like that. So before they're ever playing in the league, they go through a lot with our staff first to just make sure everything is set properly, make sure the drug testing is not an issue. But all that stuff is taken care of by the league. And so code of conduct is something that we start off with. We make sure everybody's on the same page from what they're posting on social media, to how they're representing themselves what they're talking about, et cetera, what they're sharing and not. But all these things sort of come together as part of ways to keep the whole league and everything as fair and as equitable as possible when we start competing. Do players have a requirement to do a certain amount of streaming or to be on social media promoting what the games and the Federation? No real requirement. We encourage it. We'd love to have people know what they're doing, obviously, and what they're representing. We will typically give them an asset package so that they have, so that they can share. From my perspective, if you're a player and you're representing the US or really any org at this point, it's a high accolade. You're probably top 5% in your league or within your gaming community. And so to have something like a player card and an asset from an org is really great for your portfolio. You may not win gold, which would be ideal, obviously. But even just to represent your country and be part of this team is a huge accolade. To be able to share this with your family and friends, we'll put them on the website. We'll have all of our team and rosters sitting there so that they can share. But we encourage them to do so just because we think it's something that is incredibly honorable for us to be doing. And it's sort of a new face of esports as well in this sort of space. So no requirement for them streaming and broadcasting. Also, we typically like to keep things closed in, especially when we're streaming and strategizing ahead of competition. So obviously other folks aren't learning our strategies, but they do a lot of practice and things like that, but they are not required to do any sort of broadcast, although all the IES stuff will be broadcast live. Okay, and are they amateur players or are they being paid? They will get, if they win, every title has a different bracket of pricing. So depending on their titles that they're playing in and their bracket, they can win money. So if they win that priceful money, they get that, but that's it, they're not paid otherwise. Although we do pay for all of their flight and travel, accommodation, things like that, which I think is amazing. A lot of events, even these days, you get invited, but you've got to go on your own, you've got to come up with the money. So once they're selected, we will take care of you. There's no salary involved. Oftentimes we can make roster changes that way too, so things aren't working well. But yeah, if you're qualifying and you're making money, that prize money is yours, and we send that to the teams. As far as amateur or professional goes, we do look for pro teams. So we've had pro teams in the past play for us, Nouns is another team that played for Dota 2, and they're obviously a super well-designed organization and have professional players and coaching staff, et cetera. And so we do typically look at some of those organizations as we scout, because again, like we mentioned earlier, they participate regularly internationally. They typically, they have a passport, they have their visa, they have their paperwork set up. So typically those players are a lot more eligible just based on all of our other requirements that we really have to knock out quickly, but we do open it up to amateur players as well. What is your background, Bethany, that allowed you to get in this? So I started my eSports career out of social work. I was a social worker for many years, actually prior to this, I have a degree in anthropology for some reason, but really I was teaching English outside of the country, came back and started doing some social work. I was a refugee case worker and actually worked on the hotline for intimate partner violence as well. While I was doing those jobs in my free time, I was gaming the whole time. So I was gaming with my friends to relax. I was watching a lot of Twitch streams and around that time I started thinking, hey, there's something here. People are running these events, people are coaching these players. Things started to click for me that this wasn't just something for fun. This is a real event. These are real organizations and programs. Somebody's getting paid to do some of this work. I dug a little deeper. UCI, University of California, Irvine had two professors that had started connected camps. Connected camps was a pivotal in my trajectory here. They started working with NACF, which was the North American Scholastic eSports Federation at the time. And they were running eSports programs for high school students. Connected camps in partnership with them was gonna build out the very first coaching program for these high school students. They hired me to do that job, to come in and build out a coaching program. I was hiring coaches from around the US to come in and coach high school students that were also spread across the US remotely. And so we ended up coaching hundreds of high schools throughout the US and thousands of students and doing so season after season changing titles. I stayed there for about three years, built out this program. It was wildly successful because it also had the research that was attached to it from UCI. They were doing research on the kids that were getting coaching versus the kids that weren't. The SEL components to it that were adding to students, showing up for class, having better grades, et cetera. So that was just a really interesting time because we were learning a whole lot about sort of that layer of coaching and how it develops players so young. And after that, I was writing for Microsoft as well, wrote the Microsoft eSports teacher academy and facilitated some of that for teachers just to help them understand some of these learnings that we had from near peer mentorship. I was super excited about this. And again, around the same time Cloud9 training grounds had started and Cloud9 was developing something very similar but it was a product of sorts. So it was customer facing. It wasn't just high schools and colleges. It was anybody that wanted to come get coached, have a masterclass, et cetera could come into our community and get that. So I was hiring those coaches, facilitating that time and building the curriculum that was being used for these folks. So I've been working in coaching and sort of player management for the last six years or so. And I've held some really great relationships with NAISF and the scholastic side has always been really interesting to me because I see it moving so much. And the fruit of your labor is so much more tangible there than working at an org like Cloud9 or Galaxy Racer where I've worked before where it's very much more corporatey and almost a marketing piece for fandoms and things like that. It's a little less degrading once you get into it but I've always loved the scholastic side. And so when the opportunity arose to come back to NAISF in a source with USDF it was sort of a no-brainer for me that I wanted to get involved and get my hands back into player development. All right. And in your position, do you also help coaches? Yes, so I work directly with the coaches as well. They're part of a team that's ideal for me. I would love to have somebody that's already attached to a team and bring the whole team plus their coach with us so that they can be with us internationally as well. Coaches have a special relationship with players. It's not often just how to get them through game one, two, and three. A lot of them build relationships with these players. So in times of stress they're typically a voice of reason or a familiar voice and that's really key when you're going international and you're playing on stages that are unfamiliar. You're in a country where you don't fit in and you don't speak the language and it feels confusing. So anything that sort of can bring somebody down and anchor them a little bit more in these situations is great. So if I see a coach and I really like them and I like the relationship that they have with their players we're always trying to invite them to come along. If the team doesn't have one we'd like to source one for them or find somebody in the community that could step into that role. But we really think coaching is a big part of this and helps our players a ton. What advice would you give to a player who is interested in becoming a player on one of your teams? I would say apply. So we actually have open applications. We do not gate keep. That was one of my first things that we wanted to do when I stepped into the role was let's open this up and see what kind of gems we can find. Of course there are pro teams and of course they're ready but ideally we have some veteran players coaching some amateur players that are stars as well and can really start to highlight some of their work. And the same with having some of these dedicated female teams and to be clear all of our quote unquote other teams can be mixed. So the women can play on teams with men during this series or they can play on a dedicated female team. But all of that to say yeah it's a mix of it all. Sure. And what do you think the future of eSports is? Wow, I think the future of eSports is I think it's incredibly exciting. I think we have just scratched the surface of it and so it actually makes me a little like queasy to think about like a long-term vision for eSports because I actually think it's going to be so exciting. You know eSports moves at such a rapid pace what's changing even game to game. I couldn't keep up with all five titles if I tried just the patch notes alone right. These games change so often that if you're not dedicating hours to one specific game you're losing time. So I would say you know the short term just the two to three years I see exponential growth and I say that as someone that sees everything that's falling apart as well. And I'm actually in the boat that some of this stuff that's falling off is sort of eSports sort of shedding its skin in a lot of ways and getting back to what is really essential what the community really wants. And I think that's a lot more diversity a lot more sort of big opportunities for players. And I also think player development obviously plays a huge role in this which is can we develop that younger generation that's now an elementary and middle school into these next five to 10 years. I think that's what's super exciting because we haven't had that in so long a lot of it's been your friends showing up and you get really good at the game but now it's gonna be folks that have been coached and developed and taken care of for so long that we're gonna see them as the next athletes in this space and I can't wait to see what they do. And how can people reach you to apply? Well they can email me directly there's also a form on our website which is usef.gg and they can go through the info at or you can do bethany at asep.org and submit from there but the submitting is super easy you don't have to fill out anything except for all of your eligibility and the requirements that we have and we'll reach out to you afterwards. All right, thank you so much Bethany. Thanks for having me. Thank you. All right, so thank you to our guests for joining us today in two weeks. Please join me for the final show of the wide world of eSports. I'll provide the lessons learned from this show over the past three and a half years and also give you some fun top 10s about eSports. Aloha and see you then. We want to announce that Think Tech Hawaii is moving into a new phase and will not be producing regular talk shows after April 30th. We will retain our website and YouTube channel and will accept new content on an ad hoc basis. We are also developing a legacy archive program to provide continuing public access to our content. If you can help us cover the costs of the transition and the development of our legacy archive program please make a donation on thinktechaway.com. Thanks so much. Aloha.