A brand new kind of sport may soon be coming to Macon County Schools.
For the past several years, a new frontier of interscholastic competition has been sweeping the nation’s schools, pitting video game players against one another in electronic sports, or Esports. At a special called meeting of the Macon County Board of Education Dec. 21, board members heard a unique proposal from the county’s Career and Technical Education specialists.
“In the month of November the state of North Carolina approved Esports as a sanctioned varsity sport for high school,” said MCS CTE director Colleen Strickland. “It focuses on teamwork, collaboration, strategy and coding [computer programming], and we know we have a strong desire from our students to have this type of opportunity because of the number of students who have been requesting computer science courses. So, we want to be able to provide this opportunity for students.”
After the state’s first-ever Esports championship last summer, in which eight teams from across the state met at Bank of America Stadium in Greensboro, the sport has spread rapidly through high schools around N.C. As a nationwide leader in Esports development, earlier this year UNC Greenboro launched the UNCG Scholastic Esports Alliance, and has offered assistance to N.C. high schools both in starting their own teams and implementing new CTE curricula.
“The University of North Carolina in Greensboro is a leader across the nation for Esports and all related careers, and they actually spearheaded the league for North Carolina,” said Strickland. “They will provide a coach to assist our coach, as this is a new type of sport in the state of North Carolina, and that coach is one of their students who is a graduate from their program. So, they’ll be a similar-aged coach that will be able to help our students transition into a four-year degree.”
Along with helping form and coach Esports teams, UNCG has also provided member schools with its own CTE curriculium in the classroom, focusing on STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and math) and acting as a prerequisite to its own college courses. If approved, MCS’s program would be one of the first in WNC.
“T.C. Roberson is currently doing this; they’re the only school in Western North Carolina that I’m aware of that’s doing it,” said Franklin High Career and Technical Education teacher Josh Brooks, who assisted Strickland with the presentation.
“This came up in our [STEM] conference meeting the other day, and Cherokee County is getting ready to start a team and Jackson County is interested in starting a team at their Early College,” said Strickland. “I know that Macon Early College has also expressed interest in this program, and there are grants I’ve been looking into that would be more of a regional grant to support something like this. So ... there will be other counties in our region that we can compete with.”
Much like existing varsity sports with tryouts, academic requirements and after-school practices, Strickland and Brooks proposed forming a Franklin High School team to compete in three different games: NBA 2K24, in which players control NBA teams on the court; Brawlhalla, a hand-to-hand fighting game; and Rocket League, a 3-on-3 soccer game in which players control flying cars. Team tryouts would tentatively be scheduled from late February to early March, with the state finals in Greensboro set for May 25-26.
Upon hearing the presentation, board members Jim Breedlove and Hilary Wilkes asked about the program’s accessibility for all students in the county, given that it requires high-speed internet to play online. Brooks replied that teams could hold practice in each school’s computer lab, which could be reserved for use by the team during prescribed periods after school. While Brooks and Strickland said they’d need more time to research expanding the program to the county’s other high schools, board member Stephanie Laseter moved to further gauge student interest at Franklin High School, and the motion was approved unanimously.
“I just think it’s a great opportunity to give another group of kids a purpose attached to something they can do,” said Brooks. “They may not be able to go out on the basketball court or the soccer field or the tennis court, but this is their niche.”