Vanta's Back-to-School Esports Guide

Understand Your Players

Before opening the actual club, you’ll need to understand what your students are interested in. This often involves gauging student interest in classrooms and common gathering places. With a rough idea of the type of games students like, you can create a more formal survey for interested participants to complete. This survey may include the following items:

1. Games that students are interested in
2. What consoles students play said games on, if it’s a multi-platform game
3. The frequency of which practices and league matches occur in a week
4. Whether students are interested in said games out of a competitive spirit, or just for fun

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Plan The Equipment

With an understanding of the games players like, you’ll now have to determine what equipment is needed to play those games. If you’re on a strict budget, you may have to limit the equipment to what you have, or to singular consoles. In specific, this is a brief list of common items one would need:

• Computer/Laptop
• Keyboard and mouse
• Monitors
• Headset (including microphone)
• Console
• Console controllers
• Speakers (if the setup has no sound output device)

Depending on the equipment the school already has, there may be ways to reduce the costs to reuse currently-owned equipment. An example of this would be if you’re playing a competitive PC game, where you can reuse the same computers and keyboards in your tech room as long as there is sufficient internet and powerful-enough PCs. 

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Create a Theoretical Practice Schedule

Just like regular classes, it’s important to establish a schedule to work on game-specific skills and team coordination. Typically, practices occur once a week and can last for a range of 1.5-3 hours. However, this can vary depending on several factors:

• Type of game (the more complex, the longer and more frequent practice may be)
• What students prefer on the survey, since it’ll likely occur during lunch or after school
• More practices if there are multiple games or multiple teams

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Find a Coach

If your team wants to be competitive, it’s a no-brainer to have a coach with a deep knowledge of the game, as well as previous experience teaching specific skills in the game to players of all skill levels. It’s important to have a coach that aligns with your goals, so ensure that you have a comprehensive vetting process to work with the right coach. Some metrics might include:

• Experience in the game
• If there is a ranked mode, peak rank that the coach has achieved
• Hours spent coaching
• Age group that this coach has helped
• Any certifications or degrees relevant to coaching, including any COPPA-compliant certifications

While you can find a coach from anywhere (including within the school), it may be difficult to find the ideal coach that covers all the parameters you’ve set out. With that said,  Working with Vanta Esports will allow you to bypass all these obstacles by allowing us to do the vetting for you. With our COPPA-compliant, certified coaches, as well as a premade schedule and coordination with other schools, we can get all the work done for you. All you’ll have to do is to establish a team and a budget.

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Click here to learn more about our platform and our coaches.

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Seek Official Approval From School Administrators

The reason this step is all the way down is to ensure that you have all the above items planned on a theoretical level before putting it together in the form of a proposal to the administrators. This is to make sure that they fully understand the scope of your club, as well as the economic requirements to start it. 

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This step would likely involve putting together a presentation (e.g. PowerPoint) to present to your administrators, along with the benefits of starting an Esports Club, such as:

• A place for passionate gamers to collaborate
• Teamwork in games fosters Social-Emotional regulation skills that can be generalized to daily living
• Creating a rigid routine of improvement and practice fosters a healthy growth-oriented mindset
• Potentially cheaper in the long-term than traditional sports

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Secure Funding and Resources

With approval from your administrators, it’s time to take action. With sufficient planning from the previous steps, securing your funding the resources should be a relatively straightforward step. Be flexible and adapt to unexpected events.

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Promote and Hold Tryouts

Time to bring students in! If you’re starting a club purely for fun and passion, then tryouts may not be required. However, if you have seen sizeable interest for competition and tournaments, then it may be helpful to have at least one team that holds the same mutual competitive goals.

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Tryouts can come in many forms, but typically, you can achieve this with two stages: the knowledge and practical test. The knowledge test will ask the student to explain various concepts of the game in several open-ended questions. The practice test can be done in many ways, but the easiest way may be for the student to send a VOD or recording of their gameplay, and for you or the coach to evaluate and compare with other students.

As an example, here is what a knowledge and practical test may look like for League of Legends:

• Knowledge test:
  • Understanding and defining the terminology in the game (e.g. gank, suppression, ping, soul, etc)
  • Listing the ability descriptions of certain champions to the best of their ability
  • Watching a 30 second clip and evaluating what certain champions are doing, and what they could’ve done for a better result
• Practical test:
  • Have the student send a VOD (recorded video) of one game from the current patch and a short summary of what they think they did well, as well as what they could’ve done to improve.

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Collaborate With Your Team to Design a Code of Conduct

Once you’ve gathered your group of students, it’s time to ensure that you’re all on the same page with the goals of the club. Occurring in one of the very first meetings you’ll have, your discussion with the group will involve creating an agreement that upholds the standards of respect, sportsmanship, integrity, commitment and health. As for the concrete steps:

1. Acquire a large piece of poster paper
2. Discuss with your group of the values you all want to uphold
3. Have a volunteer write those points
4. Discuss and write the consequences in violating any of these points
5. Have everyone sign their names on the bottom
6. Post it on a visually accessible part of the room for everyone to see at all times of practice.

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GET GUD!

With equipment set, players chosen, schedules established and values agreed upon, it’s finally time to enact your vision and work on being the best esports club you can make!

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Don’t forget to check out our platform for pre-vetted coaches and pre-made schedules, and most important of all, enjoy what YOU have created!

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Cheat Sheet

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1. Understand your players
2. Plan the equipment
3. Create a practice and competition schedule
4. Find a coach
5. Seek official approval from administrators
6. Secure funding and resources
7. Promote and hold tryouts
8. Collaborate with your new team to design a code of conduct
9. GET GUD

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