 Welcome to the wide world of eSports, a show devoted to all things eSports. I'm your host, Catherine Norr. Today, my guest is Bubba Gadder, the Executive Director of Varsity eSports Foundation. Our topic is Scholastic eSports 2022. Welcome Bubba. Thank you, Catherine. I'm so glad to be here. I've watched a lot of your podcasts, your shows, your episodes, and a lot of folks honored to be one of the many in eSports speaking to you today. Fantastic. OK, so, you know, we do have something interesting and common in that we both were involved in USA Triathlon. What led, what did you do in USA Triathlon? Well, there wasn't a director, a certification for marathons out there in the USA World, USA Sports World. And the closest thing was a triathlon certification for a director. I was a director of a large scale marathon with 5,000 plus people here in Kansas City that was organized in part with Garmin, you know, the smart watch. And so I organized that was a race director for about four years. And I wanted to get certified because I like because I'm a millennial and I like having things after my names and I like being entitled and having recognition. So I wanted a label on my name and I wanted to have credibility beyond just being a program nerd. And so I went to Colorado and sat down at USA Triathlon offices for three or four days and got a certification in USA Triathlon. And now I worked other triathlons throughout that space. I didn't I didn't ever participate in any. But I swim, I ride and I run plenty, but I just don't participate in those. And I think I will someday. Sir, I actually did triathlons for quite a while. And I was the regional coordinator of officials for USA Triathlon. And I attended a lot of those classes that you did. So what led you to kind of ship from being a race director for running events to being involved in eSports? Yeah, Catherine, my world really was sports for 20 years. And us in the eSports industry, we call that traditional sports, even though it never was referred to that until recently. And that was 20 years with YMCA's, Parks and Recs, Chamber of Commerce, Sports Commissions in CAA. In junior college, I used to do a lot of stuff in sports, but I also am a huge nerd. My dad worked in Radio Shack when I was a kid. So I had the ability to build computers and be a nerd. And I never really used it other than just for myself and was a gamer. And I always knew it was a talent. I should have probably done as a career, but I enjoyed sports. I played sports in college and I wanted to be in the sports industry. So I was and I had a lot of fun doing it, organizing tournaments with 20,000 kids across a metro to five K for 200 people to organizing swimming events to hosting football tournaments, all sorts of stuff. And then there was an opportunity in the convention center space. We had in a suburb here in Kansas City, and I said, you know, we're really cool to have a board game and video game type convention. And so I'm going to set that up. So I got a couple of different people here in the Kansas City Metro together and host an event with 800 people. And that's where my eSports and gaming career started, as I also was starting to stream on Twitch at that same time. Terrific. And you have a lot of rules and eSports. Tell us about what you're doing these days. Yeah, you know, I just I just am really me. And the the breaking into the industry was through a nonprofit I created with some friends here in Kansas City and working in the nonprofit world also for 20 years and all those different organizations. I noticed there was a discrepancy and there was some issues with not being able to give kids access and certain kids. When I met the owner and founder of the High School eSports League, he showed me a map of all their schools and they were all in suburbs. There's about 1500 schools that time and they were all in the suburbs. And I thought, OK, my years of working with families and socioeconomic status, low area, income areas and disenfranchised families. There needs to be kids in the urban core and the rural areas with access as well to gaming clubs or eSports clubs in schools, not just the kids who have but the kids who are usually have nuts because of systemic inequality or digital redlining, other things like that. So and I grew up in our city myself and I didn't have access either, but I'm also privileged and I got out. So for me, using the platform of a nonprofit to create that opportunity with grants and scholarships was where it all started back in 2017 and now the roles I have taken on also have been ones just because I am an ambassador and an advocate and a consultant in anything eSports and nonprofit and marketing. And I've been doing that kind of stuff for a long time, graphic design and media and marketing consulting for quite some time through all the you wear lots of hats and nonprofits. So you you potentially learn a lot of different roles and skills. So I just used all those to also teach other people for and shifting to our topic today, Scholastic eSports in 2022. What is Scholastic eSports? So that's a term we kind of use broadly for anything K through 22. So elementary, middle school, high school or primary, secondary and then also college or university. And that's if you're in this space and you've I know your other Scholastic eSports interview with Daniel Johnson from TechSaf down in Texas. I mean, she's in the heart of it. She's an educator and she wants to help her kids work be a part of not just competition, as we know, eSports is competitive gaming, but the curriculum and college and career readiness side of clubs and schools. So Scholastic really is taking the competitive structure of gaming and putting it into a club such as taking football and putting it into a club or a team at school and competing against other schools or internally. Really, you can scrimmage your own students in your school, but that's up to the college level. Obviously, since 2014 and even earlier, College eSports has been growing and growing and growing and so has the high school space, but there's this big shift the past maybe past eight years or so in the high school space. It's moved, it's shaped away from that competitive only to additional of curriculum and college and career readiness and STEM and helping kids succeed outside the competitiveness to that's now as we'll see in twenty two twenty twenty two that taking over to where it's not an eSports club. It's eSports program and you'll see that in the K-12 space. And you've been seeing Minecraft for a long time in the elementary middle school space for kids learning. My kid even at third grade was doing a Minecraft or not a Minecraft club, but like STEM based clubs and there was stuff around that. So the college space, those scholastic wise, that's the big that's the big ticket item that people know more about in the scholarship and the amount of colleges and what's happening in that space with a lot of the coaches and staff and schools really engage in that, especially during covid that expedited all that for all of us in the industry. What do you anticipate in the way of any change in scholastic eSports in two thousand twenty two? Yeah, I think I'll just hit back on you're going to see you're going to see a lot more colleges. I mean, we just got a big study out from Chris Postel with eSports Foundry that talked about the six hundred colleges that he interviewed or surveyed around North America. And I think about 10 percent of those were in Canada and we saw a large increase, but we see these really great numbers from his his study showing the moving away from that competitive side only to it's living under a not so much in athletics. It didn't have to live in athletics at a college institution or a university. And what we'll see more is the amount of extracurricular activities and curriculum and certifications and courses and majors and minors towards the focus of eSports and not just slapping a E on certain things to call it as part of a minor, but really helping students and people in the workforce gain a little more knowledge around what is the eSports industry and how do you run an event and how do you market for eSports? How do you help influencers? How do you work with teams? That sort of stuff has been around for some time, but only in small pockets. You're going to see that take off. And you had, like I said, over covid, a lot of people jumping into eSports and especially in this plastic space helping there was opportunity for people who were coaching or working other industries or in businesses. And they needed to they also wanted to teach. That's how I started teaching the higher ed was I worked in sports for so long. Somebody said, hey, come teach these college students about sports and officiating. And I started a college class. I've been teaching ever since for eight years. So that's happening as well for the people in our industry who are going to the university level and teaching. So you're going to see that shift even stronger, I think, as well as more schools, universities, especially start adopting eSports beyond just the club or student led level. Do you think that there will be a point where more schools on any level will have eSports programs than not? So let's let's go by the numbers. There's five thousand colleges and universities in the United States. We the six hundred number I gave earlier was where those schools that are really more invested beyond just the student level. But we know about eighteen hundred two thousand colleges and universities to have some form of a program. So we're kind of there in the college and university space in North America, the United States mainly, but definitely not in the full full all the way in from an administrative side at the university or institution in the high school space. We're looking at about five thousand of the thirty five thousand public private charter high schools in the United States. So we're definitely not there. That's a low percent, but it also has grown by three every year for the past, you know, four to five years. So it's going to continue to grow and middle school space continues to grow. There's about a thousand of those ninety thousand high middle schools in the United States, so it's growing. But there's a lot of that that merging with the STEM based classes and Legos and other things that are happening in middle school elementary level. So this we're not far off in the college space. The high school spaces are so many. There are, you know, upwards of a thousand high schools per, you know, five hundred or a thousand high schools per states. And there's a lot of states at the state level doing something like Daniel Johnson is doing in Texas and James O'Hagan in Wisconsin and Minnesota with Logan and Peter. They're doing stuff at the state level as the people in the state and not from a kind of top down bureaucratic space, but a space where it's teacher building from a bottom up. And that's really where the groundswell is going to continue to happen for this class to be sports space. So if you look at the students and their parents as a consumer, do you think that they're that they are really looking for the opportunity to not only have competitive options, but to have content that is consistent with today's tech environment, where there's, you know, game gamification or like use of games even beyond Minecraft. Yeah, the so the to the point with the parents and students. Consumers, that's really the gaming industry, right? It's a hundred and eighty billion dollars from the world. So it's consumers and it's the average age. United States is thirty one as we learned from our friends at the entertainment software association, forty five percent are female. Now, the competitive side, when we talk about the parents being involved in the competitive sense, that's really low. But there are some great parents who are all in just like they are for little Timmy's baseball traveling team. There is there's plenty of parents who are all in who get it. Mostly that millennial gen X generation who get it because they also grew up playing Nintendo or Sega like I did. But you still it's it's going to keep evolving and adapting. Now, the the space, though, for those parents are is limited because there's not there's not a great way to connect other than that. You know, my parents, my dad played football in college. I played football in high school, so I he connected. He understood, right? He he is a nerd where he's he wasn't a gamer, but he's a tech guy. So we can contact. But had he been a gamer, maybe something in my life would have been driven differently into games. It was more of a profession. So I think that's what's happening with the the parent space now, especially for Zoomers, the Zoomer generation, those those kids up to, you know, ninety five born, ninety five. And and later that had parents who are a gen X millennials. And they are definitely engaging a lot more in the gaming in the sports space because they're the average age of the gamer. And the things like Minecraft have been around Pokemon. I think it's so funny to see. I didn't really get into it, but it's just so funny to see people a little bit, you know, even 40, 42, I'm 39 still like, oh, my gosh, your kids play Pokemon. What kind of stuff they got? Do they got a Charizard? Like that's that's interesting that they would connect that way. And the kids still do my six year old, 10 year old and 12 year old. They like Pokemon as well. So if I had liked it, maybe I would have connected. But I like video games and I just downloaded a new game on their switch today for six bucks because I wanted to play for player with them. So as kids and parents, we try to connect, but there needs to be some sort of line there that draws them together. And it depends on generations, I think. You know, and in another way of looking at it, do you think that some parents would stay away from schools that have those programs? Yeah, I mean, you can compare that to really any activity. Sure, let's in hypothetically, let's say I don't want to go to Texas because it's all about football. So I want my kid to be more academically involved. Well, that's not really where we're we're stereotyping, but that's a pretty common stereotype of they're all about football. So I'm not going to take my kid there. Let me take my kid up north because I want them to be in somewhere where it sends people globally to be recognized and get jobs around the world. Maybe Texas isn't that that could be a very big sense. The issue is here, rather than that parents don't know that it's even happening at schools for them to say no to it because it's such a small subset of every school that sometimes it's happening and the administration has no idea it's happening because it's a bunch of kids who got together to start a club. And maybe there's the the computer science teacher who's who is the sponsor and maybe the principal knows about it, but it's just something that's happening just like when I started a club in high school for certain things. And now everybody knows about it because it's just not it's just not out there. So parents potentially saying no. The good thing is people can choose. Yeah, not only the school, but they can. Esports isn't like taking over like it would say, well, I'm not going to go to New Hampshire because it's all about eSports, all those schools, just like I would think of Texas. So it's not there that yet. And I don't I hope it won't be because we're all trying to help our kids be smarter and faster and quicker. And we all want to live by carelessly through them to for them to be, you know, accepted and professional and have a job and all that stuff, the American dream. So I don't know if people are going to say no to it because there's a team there, but they probably will after they maybe learn out, learn that there's something going on in a school potentially to stay away from that because it's a waste of time because there's plenty of stigmas. We could spend a whole another 27 minutes on about the stigmas of gaming that I'm sure you've covered in other episodes. Well, so there are a lot of parents who probably would have to Google eSports because they don't even know what it is. So what what do you think about brand infiltration in Scholastic eSports? Because clearly every single game is made by a particular publisher. And, you know, I mean, we're not talking about like generic math or science or or English. We're talking about a brand that's been created by, you know, yeah, like, like, you know, Riot Games or Epic. So first off, publishers have a ton of power, right? James Naysmith created basketball in Massachusetts and 18 something. And basketball has been around and there was 13 rules on the rulebook. Then now there's three pages of rule, three books of rules. But basketball, still basketball, I can start a basketball program in my house here and say, OK, we're playing a tournament. And no one would say you can't do that because we own basketball. We own the ball. That's obviously different with the publishers. There is a lot of IP and struggle with publishers and those games and those developers, especially in Scholastic, there's a lot of who's going to win. Who's going to help them make money? And that's what they're looking for, ultimately, usually now. But I would say beyond that, brands, when you talk about infiltrating in schools, it's funny because we say like, OK, well, basketball is not infiltrating schools in school. Books aren't math isn't. But what about the curriculum we ought to pay for? Like from McGraw Hill textbooks and all the salespeople that the district has to get involved with just so they can get a better price for a thousand books? There's there's already brands infiltrating. Unfortunately, our school systems spalding or whatever for basketball, basketball is there's already brands doing that. We just don't look at it the same way. Like there's obviously a correlation to something I could say we don't look at this anymore in life because it's just natural, right? So we as a new industry are we are big gatekeepers. We are very big gatekeepers in the sports industry when it comes to canceling people and other sorts of things. But this classic space is an extremely big gatekeeper. There are a lot of parents and teachers out there. And rightfully so, they should have a say in things and they do because it's a public institution and it's owned by the people. And the idea of brand infiltration is scary because one, we as eSports don't want to be like other industries. But how long can we gatekeep until they're really? Can we can we delay the inevitable, I guess, because every other part of school has some sort of issue with it as well? Can we really hold off or is it just the natural way of things? I have no idea. But it's important for us to be vigilant and talk about it because if we're not, then we're just another thing. And yeah, it's it's out there. But the brands and the IPs and the publishers and the developers, there's a lot of power there. And, you know, working in the title one space of all these schools, I can I see that they don't really ever get attention. But man, if they had the attention of somebody like a game developer saying, hey, we'll give you ten thousand dollars and like, oh, my gosh, that's the biggest grant we've ever had in the history of our school, probably so. And they would be all for whatever kind of thing they had to put on their jerseys or a banner in their school. That's just unfortunately, a common thing just as much as a, you know, insurance agent putting their logo on a banner in the basketball gym is accepted. So it's where do we draw the line? We don't know, because we're big gatekeepers. You know, it's interesting because as consumers, we watch golf and we see Tiger Woods with Nike logo on his hat and on his shirt. And we don't even notice it, you know, or something, you know, because we're so used to those logo logos on any athlete that we see. And it was interesting because when I officiated international triathlon union events, we actually had to cover the logos on our hats or shirts. We could not have any logos. And and so, you know, in when we think about I think it's interesting how you said that they're already there, that it's that we have these, but we don't really notice it. So I mean, you know, that's a really interesting point. Do you see in 2022, do you think that there's going to be new games that that are developed that, you know, that we don't even know about yet or that, you know, maybe something that's just started lately that will become more popular in a school environment? 100 percent, Catherine, the next two weeks will have a new game. And then the next two weeks after that, it'll be a new game. And every two weeks throughout the next 52 weeks, there's going to be something new that is hot, hot and happening in the space. But it's also some of these games get big because of influence or push or buy for marketing, where you see a bunch of gamers on Twitch playing a certain game because they all got paid to and but they like it otherwise and that's out there. And that's what draws people to things like a Fall Guys or an Among Us. Among Us has been around for many, many years, but only picked up because of COVID and a bunch of people starting to play it that are high up on the viewer account for online gaming and streaming. So that's going to happen over and over this year, because the power of that influence is there just as much as, yeah, like the Nike logo is there. But in my head, I'm thinking I should buy Nike because I need to be as good as Tiger. That's why companies spend marketing dollars, right? And that's why they do it. And they're going to do it with games as well. And even though there was a game this year that they said they weren't going to do any influencers, they went back on that and actually did not for the purpose of other developers. They just like that do, but they wound up doing it anyways, because they knew there was an opportunity there and they saw the writing on the wall that they couldn't really make an impact unless they did that in this climate. So it's going to happen over and over. And the new games that come out that we don't know about, yeah, maybe they've been in development for five years, but they're not out because it's some indie, indie, indie organization, which indie games are a very hot item the past, you know, 10 years, I guess 50 years. Really, indie games have been around for a long time. But till now, there's now that easily it's easily accessible to create. Your kids can create on a code based program, a game that we can create a game on our phone. So it's much more accessible, just like all the other things that are accessible in our technology age. And how do you think that the pandemic has influenced scholastic e-sports? Well, it's if a lot of people say, I mean, when March rolled around 2020 and schools started shutting down and everything started shutting down, the football teams, basketball teams, banned you. Maybe you could like my 12 year old did banned over Zoom, which it's not the same, right? He learned how to play the clarinet. He basically learned how to play the clarinet. But that was that was something you do. Maybe football coaches could give assignments for workouts to go do in their yard. Or at that time, you know, we couldn't even go outside, right? Because we could we even walk down a trail in March. It's much different, right? And we were we were hand washing and wiping down our groceries compared to what we do now. So Jim Gaffigan's new comedy routine talks a lot about that. I think that's where I'm getting my comedy right now. But that's the the covid the epidemic and the pandemic with with 2020 and 2021. Esports was the resilient thing that we all talked about since March 2020. We've been talking about this, that it's been the resilient thing because it's not something that had to shut down because it's already online. Yeah, the opportunity to be face to face really hurt those brands really hurt those companies that wanted to advertise, but they had to shift. They had to shift to online marketing on Twitch, which exploded and YouTube gaming and Facebook and every other platform out there, ritual motion. Those are out there doing things where brands can show off just like a TV commercial. Obviously, it's even better than TV now on all the data we have. So it's grown and it's going to continue to grow because just as much as we like organizations and companies are sending their staff back to the office is because, wow, my staff can actually do this. But then there's a whole debate there. We can that's a whole another topic and and everything that's going on with property and everything else, but it's going to continue to grow because the pandemic expedited a lot of stuff for esports, this classic esports space as well. And we've seen nothing but growth and those developers and those publishers. They made a lot of money off it as well because everybody was buying games. Even those thirty one year olds who hadn't played in a while and they bought new games to play while they were also working and hanging out at their house. You know, that it seems like people recognize the fragility of this traditional sports situation that we can't always just assume we'll be able to get together in person and have these traditional sporting events and practices and that maybe there's a little bit more stability in being on the internet and interacting so that we're not, you know, getting our germs on each other. So, you know, I mean, that might be it. But tell us about Varsity Esports Foundation. Yeah, Catherine, just like I said earlier, we a couple of years ago started up to help with grants and scholarships to students in disenfranchised areas. And that's my main role in life right now for the past few years and raising funds to support schools that are in need. Title one schools here in the United States, those are schools with high free reduced lunch needs, percentages as well as schools in disenfranchised areas, low income areas, low socioeconomic status that are in need. So that's really our main focus. We've evolved to a lot more things into education as well as creating videos to help people understand what is esports so parents can see videos and help their kids. We work with a lot of we work with a lot of other organizations. You know, we were one of the first nonprofits in esports and we're happy to be that. And then ever since then, it's been a lot of fun getting to know a lot of other folks in the nonprofit space and esports and how much we've all been able to do and do together and how there's a lot of fun overlap for us to combine efforts and help parents and kids and whether it be LGBTQI plus and, you know, women and students and schools and everything out there, the nonprofit space in esports, it's been fun. And so we just spend a lot of time connecting I mean, the values for the foundation of my values because I run it and just want to connect people. And that's what I've been doing for a long time. And I want to keep doing it and keep talking about it. And if we're not talking about this stuff now, then when? And that's you can find out more about us on our website at varsityesportsfoundation.org. We take donations and they turn those donations right back into grants for students and schools in the United States. Right now, some in Canada, some overseas, so they can have access to esports clubs like the other kids do. Fantastic. Well, I think that's a terrific direction to go. And, Baba, thank you so much for being my guest today. I really appreciate it. Katherine, it was fun. I'm so glad and honored. We could find some time here on the end of the end of this 2022 opportunity for what's going to happen in Slastiki Sports. I hope to learn some more and maybe share some more as well. Fantastic. All right. And thank you to our viewers for joining us today next week. My guest will be Johnny Ryan Weaver of Click Gaming. See you then. Aloha.