Students competing in the esports program at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa., will receive access to training tutorials as part of a new partnership between the college and ProGuides, an esports training platform.
In February 2018, Lebanon Valley College became the 51st member of the National Association of Collegiate Esports. The private institution will now provide its esports athletes with access to ProGuides’ training content and video tutorials. LVC students will initially use the software for training in League of Legends, Hearthstone, and Counter Strike.
“This really goes beyond the traditional athletic training that any of us grew up with it,” said David Shapiro, esports director of operations at Lebanon Valley Cottage. “A lot of our players spend a lot of time studying for their courses. Sometimes when they start to practice it might be later in the evening. If they could do that without having to try to schedule a physical coach then they could do that at 11, 12 o’clock at night. That’s an incredible thing for us to offer to our students.”
Much of the video content offered by ProGuides is hosted by pro esports players. ProGuides updates its training coverage roughly every two weeks to keep up with video game publishers’ frequent release of updates. The company hopes to have 20 collegiate esports programs using its software by the end of this year. The platform also integrates statistics directly from the games.
“They’re going to be able to track their progress in the game itself via our API access to the game publisher,” said Samuel Wang, CEO at ProGuides. “They can track their latest match stats if they play online, or their overall performance.”
Lebanon Valley Cottage fields teams competing in nine different video game titles, and recently announced a new esports scholarship worth $10,000 over four years. The school’s esports program currently has one head coach and three assistant coaches, and Shapiro believes ProGuides will help his staff reinforce their coaching advice.
“The videos are there to show them the things we’ve been saying so they can consume it easily,” Shapiro said. “I can say something to a player a hundred times. Having a second voice say it to a player is the most amazing thing in the entire world. They all the sudden go ‘Hey that’s an incredible idea.’”