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A Chat With Robert Morris's Video Game Visionary

By Jim Bochnowski in Arts & Entertainment on May 4, 2015 8:35PM

Robert Morris University finished in second place in the North American Collegiate Championship Sunday, losing three games to zero to the University of British Columbia.

The tournament, consisting of over 1600 schools and taking place over the course of several months, featured universities across the country competing in League of Legends, an incredibly popular online strategy-based video game. However, Robert Morris has one defining characteristic: They're the first American university to offer scholarships to up and coming League of Legends (or LoL) players.

As competitive video game playing, or esports, begins to rise up into mainstream acceptance (seriously, it was on ESPN the other day), we reached out to Kurt Melcher, the coach at Robert Morris who first encouraged the school to embrace esports.

Melcher, an associate athletic director and women's soccer coach at Robert Morris, originally brought the idea of offering scholarships for esports players to the attention of the school's president. He's been a lifelong player of video games and recently became acquainted with the LoL. As he explained it, he quickly realized that the lessons learned by playing on a LoL team, such as the value of teamwork and leadership skills, were incredibly similar to those learned in traditional sports.

In really simplified terms, a typical LoL match consists of two teams of five players competing to destroy each other. The players each have a distinctive character with specific attributes, which they must use in harmony to create the best chance of winning the game.

While playing, Melcher recognized that the best players had a certain ability to process information incredibly quickly, giving them a distinct, innate advantage that he couldn't match. He believed LoL players were similar to professional athletes, who are often said to visualize their sport differently than the average amateur player.

Melcher brought this idea to the school's president, Michael Violtt, who quickly agreed. From then on, the university treats the esports team in the exact same manner as every other team on campus.

The school built a facility for the students, which ha been adorned with gaming sponsorship deals, thanks to a lack of NCAA oversight. Through Riot Games, the company that created LoL, the school found a coach, Ferris Ganzman, a Loyola University graduate who is also an accomplished LoL player in his own right.

The team, which has about 30 active users, practices every Monday through Thursday from 4:30 to 9 p.m., where they work on incorporating specific strategies, improving weaknesses and watching tapes of their opponents. The athletic department regularly monitors the players' grades to make sure they're not overwhelmed by the rigors of the practice schedule and encourages them to get away from the computer from time to time. The coaching staff manages to recruit young high school players online by checking out their win/loss records through the game.

And while Robert Morris may stand alone as the one school offering a LoL scholarships, there's still plenty of competitive collegiate teams out there. Robert Morris is in a conference with local teams such as Northwestern, DePaul, UIC, Illinois, Kentucky and Illinois State. And Melcher he says he has talked to representatives from more than 30 schools about setting up similar programs.

But more than anything, Melcher sees this as a way to create a more "passionate" student body. Competitive LoL players are as dedicated to improving their games as any athlete on campus, he says, and that enthusiasm is contagious.