 Welcome to the wide world of eSports, the show devoted to all things eSports. I'm your host, Catherine Norr. Today, we're talking about eSports events going live. With me today is Angela Bernard Thomas, Executive Vice President of eSports U. Welcome, Angela. Hi, Catherine, very nice to meet you and be with you here today to talk about eSports. Fantastic. So I understand that you are on the north shore of Oahu. How are the waves today? That's great. I didn't check the wave report, but in the past few days, waves have been up. And I'm gonna go and check it out after this, though. All right, fantastic. Are you a surfer by any chance? I'm not, but my children are. So I'm going to learn, though. Fantastic. So what's eSports U? Well, we've got a lot of great things going on. eSports U is a division of collegiate sports management group, CSMG for short. CSMG is a property rights management company, meaning that we represent conferences and colleges on both the traditional sports side as well as the sports sides for sponsorships, media rights, licensing, name and image likeness deals, valuations. So essentially we're responsible for monetizing the intellectual property of schools in traditional athletics, as well as eSports. And we've been doing eSports now for about a year and represent close to 500 colleges. And we represent 23 different conferences. And five of those also have eSports in them. All right, and intellectual property is really important to eSports. Are you an attorney or are you like in an agent position? I'm not, I would say in my heart, I'm a producer, born a producer. I would think I love to create and build things. In my career in eSports, I've been a first mover and a pioneer in starting things in eSports. It's an amazing space where you have the opportunity to really innovate and be first to market on things. And I think that's one of the things that we're really excited about. eSports U and this event that we've stood up here in the past six months called the Collegiate eSports Commissioner's Cup. And it's a pretty exciting thing we've got going. And I'd love to tell you more about that as well. Okay, let's talk about that. Is that an in-person event or is that virtual? It is an in-person event. And we are so excited about it. Historically, it's very important for collegiate eSports in general. It represents the largest assembly of schools, teams, players, conferences. We're going to have 64 different teams competing across four different game titles, Valorant, Super Smash Brothers, Ultimate, Rocket League and Overwatch. Close to 500 competitors will be participating in this event. 272 starting teams with all their substitutes and coaches and admins and athletic directors and commissioners coming. This has never been done before in collegiate eSports. And we really spent the past year sort of nurturing the idea that collegiate eSports is a little fragmented in its formative stages. Let's create an event that happens at the end of the season where we can go into a market and bring economic impact into a market, bring the community together, activate local colleges, industries, like to see that happening as well. Our event will be happening in Atlanta at the Gateway Center Arena, May 7th and 8th. And collegiate eSports is starting to get ecosystems inside these markets that work very closely with the convention visitors' bureaus and the sports commissions, just how they would want to bring a big NCAA basketball tournament to their market. Markets are now vying to bring major eSports events to their market. They realize that video games, cosplay, eSports is all very popular amongst ages 16 to 34. And it really is becoming the national pastime of a lot of people as well as also because of its tech-centric careers involved around it. It's also really building the workforce and the leadership of tomorrow through eSports. So in looking at that event, how were the teams selected to participate? Okay, so the 64 teams ended up there. We run our own event series, which we call them regional events, Invitational. We invite schools to come in and participate in those same four game titles that I mentioned before. And then we also reached out to conferences like Mountain West and the MEAC and ECAC and the East Coast College Conference and the Peach Bell and the NJCAAE, which represents all two-year colleges across the country. We represent some of those conferences and then invited additional conferences by giving them bids into our tournament. So we would offer different commissioners that run conferences, a bid into the tournament. And then from their regular season playoffs, they would determine a winner through their matches and then they elect that winner to send to participate in our Collegiate eSports Commissioners Cup. Are there any Hawaii teams that are participating? Okay, well, that's very interesting. University of Hawaii actually participated in one of our regional events and they also participate in the Mountain West Conference. And while they gave it their best battle and best put forward, they did not end up being the winning team in either of those events. But we love them, we love University of Hawaii eSports team. We do have a bit of a delegation coming to the event from Hawaii. We actually have a studio that we run here on Hawaii, the eSports Youth Studio. We have four full-time staff that work in there. We produce 12 hours of live Collegiate eSports content a day. So that team that works in that studio will be coming to Atlanta to be part of the crew, creating social content, helping with production, back of house production and eSports event is very similar to any type of sporting event or a music festival or anything. It's quite advanced the production that goes on behind the scenes. And then as one more, and then as well from Hawaii, we also have PC gamers Hawaii coming who will be coming there and they will be doing a PC build right on site. So young people that are interested in learning how to build their own PC can come and watch. There'll be little tutorials and we'll also be raffling off some of those PCs that they're building there on site. So Hawaii will be well represented and loved at this event. So the eSports Youth Brand, is it, I mean, your facility, is it on Oahu in Honolulu or? Yes, okay. Yes, it is. Yep, small studio. We run very efficiently, very lean. During the day, what we do is we schedule the most important collegiate eSports matches that are going on. We broadcast them live. We put high-end broadcast graphics around it and we hire talent. I'm not sure if you know, but in eSports, well, of course you do, but in eSports we have shoutcasters which are similar to sports casters except they understand everything that's going on in the video games and they are calling the plays and highlighting the competitors that are playing. So we have high-end talent that shoutcasts each match. The college students love this. They're actually getting casted by talent. It's very exciting for them. And then at the same time, we produce a whole second stream that we capture that is all student-led producers. So we're helping train producers in eSports and we also do student casting. So we're training casters, teaching them to be talent, casting talent, host talent and production talent. So we really place an importance on what we can give back to students and colleges and the eSports programs to really elevate their experience in eSports throughout their college time spent there and hopefully they walk away with something that they can take into their career as well. So let's talk about the live event. Have you had any live events yet in COVID? We had two live events last year actually. We had one in South Bend, Indiana at the Bend X Arena, which was a newly built eSports arena. It went very well. We brought in 32 teams from across the Midwest region that came in and competed. They qualified to compete in our national event, the commissioners cup. And then we also held another regional in Florida in Kissimmee, Florida, which again was a great success. These students are just thrilled to be able to get back together, be in the same room competing. They build friends, they trade ideas, they talk about their careers. They form long-term relationships and friendships at these events. And we believe that they're very important live events. We run a lot of online events as well, but live events I believe is really in very, there's a lot of pent up demand right now for live events. So we feel very confident that we're gonna get a full house at our event in terms of ticket sales. We've already sold over 1,000 tickets for Saturday, which is a win for us in terms of eSports. We're activating a lot of community there through groups like the Atlanta eSports Alliance, which is part of the Atlanta Sports Commission, activating the Georgia Scholastic eSports Federation, which organizes all the high schools and high school coaches. We're gonna be having a coaches cup, small little feature inside of our event. So we really think we're checking a lot of boxes in terms of what makes an event exciting for people to attend. First of all, people like to come out and see competitive gameplay. If you go to a football game, you wanna see teams that are worthy opponents of each other. And at this event, we will have the 64 best teams in the country competing against each other. But we don't stop there. So you started your company in 2021 then? So I came on as a consultant at Collegiate Sports Management Group in 2021, ran a few events for them. And then beginning January, 2021, 22, I came on as the executive vice president of eSportsU, running the whole vertical now, standing up some of these initiatives that I've been talking about here today with you. So was there any, I mean, it sounds like you boldly go into doing these live events. Have you had any challenges with the pandemic? Well, not of yet. We obviously always follow the protocols that the venue has in place in terms of, cleaning stations in between matches, wearing masks. Right now Atlanta is pretty open in terms of their policies. They follow the state of Georgia. So we generally follow whatever state we're in. And when we did do the event in South Bend, there were COVID protocols that we had to follow there. Again, when we went into Florida, there was COVID protocols like wearing masks, social distancing. We've all seen that lighten up a little bit now across the board. So the protocols in Georgia are, there's not a mask mandate. Although on the production side, we do have a mask mandate for our production crew. There is not a vaccine mandate as of now for the event. So we follow what are the protocols of the venue. We depend on them to sort of set those guidelines for us and the attendees. And have you learned any lessons about having events during COVID era? Yeah, I think the biggest event, the biggest takeaway is just to be mindful about interacting with people. We haven't had to cancel any events because of a major happening or anything like that. I did myself attend several conferences last year where the mandates were pretty strict. Even at those, there were happenings of COVID there. I think it was pretty common for the end of last year. I have not traveled here since the beginning of January and I don't know about you, but I still want to be as cautious as I can when traveling and washing my hands and things like that. But we haven't had any upset because of COVID at any of our events. That's terrific. Do you have any advice for putting on live events? Yes, I mean, this whole event that we're doing is really a lesson in itself. First of all, just from the historical importance of what we're doing and for the first time, bringing all these organizations together that generally would compete against each other. So we're learning how to be very collaborative in a space that is in its formative era. And we truly believe that we are creating a framework in which all of collegiate esports will benefit from, not just from our event. And I would say that one of the biggest things that we deal with in live esports events is the marketing side of it. And what we've found is that there's no magic formula here. It literally is just layers of anything and everything that you can do to attract micro communities to come and enjoy your event. So for instance, we've really partnered with a lot of great community leaders in the area like the Georgia Scholastic Esports Federation who really knows how to activate high schools. We partnered with a group called Most Valuable Kids and we'll be giving all of them. We've got 500 young people come into this for Most Valuable Kids. We'll be giving them a comp ticket and a sponsor will come in and pay for them to have a lunch while they're at the event. We've activated the cosplay community to come out and wear costumes and we're giving away $1,000 prize for who has the best costume when they come out. We've partnered with the Atlanta Falcons who is gonna be there in the parking lot doing a football toss and having their mascot out there where we've got a DJ out there. We've got the Atlanta Skyhawk which this is their arena that we're in. The Air Force is coming out and highlighting their AR truck which is a simulation truck. Young people will be able to go in and try out flying an airplane. We've got a DJ, we've got five food trucks. So all of this is to market the event. And we do paid social media campaigns. We do a lot of press. We have a great press agency that we work with, DKC, one of the best in the world in sports and eSports. We do a lot of press releases with our partners. That's very important. That's where we can get a lot of our messaging out there. So the industry sees why we're doing this event, how we're pulling it off, how we're being collaborative in the space. We do a lot of organic social media posts. And because we believe that eSports, especially collegiate eSports is a very passionate community. We get a lot of earned social content out there. So we're super excited about it. As with anything, it's both exciting and terrifying at the same time. So in the end, we'll take away all the engagement metrics and learnings from our marketing. But I would say don't skimp on your marketing budget. Absolutely. So I was interviewed by T.J. Horgan on the news. I think it was maybe over a year ago and it was about eSports and kind of the emergence of eSports. Although I think that the general public is not as knowledgeable about eSports generally, like the older generation, maybe not so much. People that are not into gaming or into this environment. But I did mention in that interview that I thought that Hawaii needs a Tom Moffitt in order to put events on in eSports. And I kind of see you as that Tom Moffitt of eSports. And so because you seem to have so much passion and experience in putting on events, do you see yourself putting on events in Hawaii? I mean, thank you for the compliment. And I think I could be a promoter all day long in Hawaii. And I agree with you 100%. Hawaii would welcome with open arms any type of eSports event that we could bring here. What the group that works with us in the studio is led by Kyler Tandal. He's a native here. Great example of the careers in eSports. He gave up a job working at Pearl Harbor as a nuclear mechanic. And we offered him this position to run the studio. Young person, 26 years old, left his job at Pearl Harbor and is now running an eSports studio here on Hawaii. So it's very exciting. So he knows all of the community. So between he and I, we would love to get together. And I think you're the third wheel here. We've got a great delegation. So I say let's do it. Our company's on board for it. Absolutely. Okay, so after your Atlanta event, what do you have planned for the future? Well, we're not gonna stop there. We're gonna be selling for our Atlanta event in 2023. We'll be going back to Atlanta most likely. And then we have lots of regionals coming up in the fall. We're gonna have a summer series running. We're going to do a collegiate eSports awards show. We're going to run an athletic directors and coaches convention for collegiate eSports. We're gonna run a Fortnite series. So we've got a lot of stuff planned after the Atlanta event. Terrific. Well, I'll give you the last word and let you tell people how they can find you. Thank you, Katherine, so much. So best place to find me is on LinkedIn. You can go there, Angela Bernhardt-Thomas. You're putting it up here on the signage. But if you wanna see more about the event, you could go to c-e-c-c dot g-g. Terrific. Well, Angela, thank you so much. And good luck to you and your team in putting on this great event in Atlanta very soon. Thank you, Katherine, and thank you for inviting us. All right, and thank you to our viewers for joining us today. My guest next week will be April Welch for a special Star Wars Day show. May the fourth be with you. See you then. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.