Creating esports programs with managed network services

Key points:

Esports programs continue to grow in popularity, as evidenced by widespread adoption in schools across the country. In fact, the global esports market is expected to grow by $4.8 billion by 2030. While esports programs are most commonly found on college and university campuses, high schools and even middle schools have begun launching programs.

Participating in esports can help students develop leadership and teamwork skills, and can even lead to scholarship opportunities at certain colleges and universities, according to Scholarships.com. technology serves as the underlying foundation for any school esports program; However, organizers do not need to have strong in-house IT teams – the expertise of a technology partner can help students enter the esports field.

Bring an esports program to life

A modern digital infrastructure is the fundamental foundation for a successful esports program. In the world of online gaming, a few milliseconds can mean the difference between winning or losing, with school pride, prizes, and potentially scholarships at stake. Latency or lag in a school's Internet connection can significantly affect the outcome of a competition. Using a dedicated wired connection can provide optimal reliability and minimize latency. It is also useful to consider provider service level agreements (SLAs) that not only ensure reliability, but also include robust metrics for performance indicators such as latency. As the esports program grows, the digital infrastructure should be able to scale easily. The increased bandwidth required when adding more players and playing increasingly higher resolution games should not impact other school operations on the network.

He cannon schoola K-12 school in Concord, North Carolina, has created a successful esports program that serves as both a recreational league and a competitive collegiate sport. The school opted for a co-managed system in which its service partner installed fiber connectivity and manages network security (unified threat management including a firewall, advanced malware protection, and intrusion prevention), while the school's Cannon School's internal IT manages content filtering. to ensure that students access only age-appropriate websites.

About 60 students joined Cannon School's esports program in its first two years of operation, and about half compete on the varsity team. Tram Tran, director of Information technology at the school, attributes its popularity to the simple fact that young people love computer games. Tran expects the school's esports program to see an increase in participants in the coming years, and that the IT solution implemented can easily scale to address the increased number of users on the system, as well as video games that require a increasingly intensive data usage.

“With our esports program, we are building this path from high school to college and then from college to the pros,” Tran said.

Ensure technology as the basis of electronic sports

Understanding and implementing the necessary technology foundation can be overwhelming for schools with limited internal IT resources, but working with an experienced technology partner can help. technology partners not only offer the expertise and guidance needed to implement an esports program, but can also provide ongoing support (through managed network services) to ensure that network operations are continuously monitored and that competitions have the necessary bandwidth to run smoothly.

According to the Consortium for School Network (CoSN) on the 2023 State of Educational technology LeadershipNearly half of respondents (45 percent) felt insufficiently staffed to plan and implement new technologies. Managed network services can offer schools peace of mind by monitoring network performance and cybersecurity issues 24/7, freeing IT staff from daily troubleshooting. Beyond supplementing staff resources, managed services also offer the benefit of no upfront hardware ownership costs, and fixed, regular spending offers predictability for school budgets.

Next steps

For schools thinking about launching an esports program, a conversation with a potential technology solutions partner is a good starting point. An experienced partner can evaluate a school's current IT network services, help identify what is required, and determine a realistic plan and timeline for establishing a program. Schools equipped with a robust digital infrastructure can offer students unique opportunities to compete, collaborate and thrive in the esports space, and leveraging managed network services to assist with technology performance can make things easier for students. employees who focus on program execution. and success.