NEW YORK — NCAA president Mark Emmert doesn’t know where esports might fit in with the association that regulates major college sports. The plan is for the NCAA to find out more.
The association announced last week it has contracted Chicago-based marketing and consulting firm Intersport to further explore the collegiate esports landscape.
“This is such a fascinating, rapidly-evolving area of activity,” Emmert said of esports on Wednesday at the Learfield Intercollegiate Athletics Forum presented by SportsBusiness Daily/Global/Journal.
“It’s clear that it’s exploding on campuses, it’s disorganized in a lot of ways. There’s a number of different groups trying to organize it with some success and some fits and starts as you’d expect. There’s again no surprise a big debate about whether this is ‘sport’ or not — ‘athletics’ or not — arguments on both sides of that. It certainly has elements of it that fit some of the abilities of the (NCAA) to organize things and set up rules and set structure in place. And then there’s things that are completely outside of the norm of what the NCAA does and what we do in the national office. So we’re right now exploring, trying to understand, trying to see what would be desirable for our universities and colleges and their students, and the answer may be ‘eh, we don’t see a role.’ Or the answer may be, ‘Yeah, there’s a really interesting role here.'”
Emmert said the timeline on studying esports was probably a year. Intersport will assist with engaging a variety of collegiate esports stakeholders beginning this month with a final report due to the NCAA in the spring.
“At the request of the NCAA Board of Governors, we’re taking a step forward by working with NCAA membership to understand current interest in and support of esports,” Joni Comstock, NCAA senior vice president of championships, said in a statement. “Ultimately, we hope to determine if the NCAA should have a role in supporting growth in this rapidly expanding space.”
The NCAA wants to learn more about how existing esports clubs and programs are structured, funded and administered, Comstock said. NCAA member schools are already participating in esports, including a Power 5 conference school in Utah that sponsors a varsity program. More than 475 colleges and universities currently support esports at a club level, and approximately 50 schools offer scholarships.
“They want to know better,” Kurt Melcher, Intersport’s executive director of esports, told ESPN of the NCAA. “I give them credit for knowing what they don’t know and doing the due diligence to find out what is happening. Is it something that would serve the membership by becoming involved? They understand also that there are major hurdles and it is not similar to traditional sports. Taking the time in learning as much as possible is a good first step. What they want to do is unknown. I don’t think they know what they will be doing, maybe nothing in the end of the day. Once the information and datasets come back, that’s TBA.
“The current NCAA structure, as we know, in some ways fits and in some ways does not fit collegiate esports as it stands right now. On both sides, the NCAA wanting to learn everything they can about collegiate esports, what is happening at schools and how administrators and students feel about it. And on the other side, what do students and administrations feel about esports and formalizing it potentially at that kind of level? Is there some kind of disconnect? Is there a possible path for it? Is it possible?”
It was Melcher who in 2014 established the first varsity collegiate esports program at Robert Morris University Illinois.
“Right now, in esports, generally a high-level team can go to attend some LANs,” Melcher told ESPN. “Maybe it’s $500 [in a prize pool], but that definitely would be an event that generally the NCAA structure does not allow. That is something that has to be considered.
“There is also the schedule and practice time, which the NCAA has currently, in traditional athletics, set their standards. There is also Title IX. Programs generally, if they are part of a conference school, are blocking a thin line as far as Title IX are handed out or issued athletic scholarships, so that’s another consideration.
“I don’t have any answers to those, but that is something in the main topic points, overall, that we are going to try to learn as much as we can about, and get the best information.”
