It's been just about nine months now that the school district I work for started their own Esports team. It was honestly a lot more work that I feel it should have been. Getting buy in from the district was the hardest part.
We started this process over a year ago but the school board wanted to put the brakes on it and think about things some more. It wasn't until we got some new leadership that we were able to push things through.
The fact is traditional sports remain a large draw for students and the community (especially in a small town). That's the one thing they care about more than anything else. As long as the football team is doing well everyone is happy. You probably know how it goes.
I think there was a concern that starting an Esports team was going to draw players away from those traditional sports. It wasn't until we explained that most of these students don't play traditional sports anyway that they were on board.
If the students do play traditional sports, that's fine too. We have plenty of multi-sport athletes in our district. Additionally, it allows teens who normally wouldn't have that "team" experience in high school to experience that.
All pictures/screenshots taken by myself or 
These are some photos of the room I setup for them. The monitors are brand new. They aren't the greatest, but they are 32" and support a high resolution with something like a 2 ms or less latency. The kids haven't seemed to complain about them yet.
We are working on getting some gaming chairs and then I am going to start focusing on getting some gaming equipment for them. I recently wrote a $6000 grant for the program and between the monitors and the chairs, that money is spent.
Once we have these upfront expenses out of the way, we should be good to go. I think in the future we want to have some kind of streaming service available to the other students with the potential for some student commentators. I think broadcasting our matches would be really cool.
I got an update from the coaches the other day and it sounds like our teams are coming right along. They are currently participating in Rocket League and Mario Kart. All the teams find themselves in the middle of the pack as far as rankings. I don't think that is too bad for our first year of competition.
I'm really looking forward to seeing how the program grows. It would be cool to have some students start getting scholarships for their Esports accomplishments.
We are within an hour of Northwood University which has one of the most awarded College Esports teams in the country.
Right now the students are using mostly consoles to play the game, but I would like to get some custom PC's built for them. I think 
You better believe if we go down that road we will be writing some posts about it.
I'm also looking into getting some corporate sponsorships for the program to see if we can grow it that way. I recently reached out to Nintendo about getting some equipment. I haven't heard back from them yet. Honestly, I am not holding my breath, but then again you never know!
I think it would be cool to one day have a Splinterlands team or something like that.
All pictures/screenshots taken by myself or
