FUTURE INTENT OF THIS SEMESTERLY UPDATE AND INTRODUCTION
For the past 4 semesters I’ve produced an academic report card start providing more visibility within our program to you the supporters and viewers. However, two things are happening from this point forward. The GPA report card will be a standard update while I work to evolve this into more of a newsletter we will use to promote our achievements, opportunities of impact, and student stories. Additionally, the keys to this will be handed over to the Media & News team now that the standard is being established and they will drive the narratives on top of director areas of highlighting.
The Spring 2024 semester was full of change and opportunity kicking off the year with our Board of Regents approving our proposal to renovate our allocated space on campus. This was followed by the the first employees formally of OU ECCI’s timeline with two graduate assistants over our Community & Labs and Intercollegiate Esports Programs. This marks the biggest impactful shift away from our grassroots student organizational volunteerism start into further formalized departmental growth. The creation of an alumni advisory board and the enablement of the first undergrad jobs are mark the Spring 2024 semester as a significant one. Take a look below as this newsletter format may evolve a little in the future but the insights are broken into three categories. Top Level updates, Notable Awards, and Departmental specific updates. We greatly appreciate you taking the time to stay on top of what The University of Oklahoma is doing with our gaming culture and esports developments and hope to continue building our legacy and successes for generations to come!
– Director Moog, OU Esports & Co-Curricular Innovation (OU ECCI), The University of Oklahoma
TOP LEVEL DEPARTMENTAL UPDATES
THE SPRING 2024 GPA REPORT CARD & ORGANIZATIONAL PULSE
PROGRAM INSIGHTS
OTHER PROGRAM DATA
COMMUNITY INSIGHTS
- All 3 campuses represented in community
- All 18 Norman colleges represented in community
- Remains one of OU’s biggest single topic interest groups
- 550+ new community members since July 2023
- Now over 10% of entire student population in size
MARKETING ANALYTICS & PERFORMANCE
GAMING CLUB FOLLOWERS
- OU_GamingClub(IG) – 579 (+80)
- OU_GamingClub(X/Twitter) – 252 (+26)
- OU_GamingClub(Facebook) – 36 (New)
- Discord – 3450
"GAMERHAUS" LIVING LEARNING COMMUNITY COHORT SELECTED
You are probably thinking so wait, students can compete for OU and they can live together in OU residence halls!? No or not yet at least. The “GamerHaus” is a living learning community or LLC as known across housing programs across different schools. Having dedicated dorms to a specific topic or area of study has proven to increase student retention rates, their grades, and their graduation timelines. By using single topic housing opportunities you have several examples of this at OU with the “Honors College” dorms, “Athletics” dorms, and “freshman only” dorms. Because many students regardless of a their variables all have at least some commonality in topic or interest it becomes easier for them to make friends, find interest groups, and be setup for the best possible success outside of the classroom.
The GamerHaus LLC will NOT be focused on our program students or external recruits. That will be pushed for way later which will resemble the closest thing to athletic dorm equivalency. However, this LLC is focused on inviting students who are organically already at OU and have interests in gaming culture and/or esports programming. We have already written curriculum and in collaboration with OU Housing Services will vet an RA who will be responsible for the area who will then have access to our complex in the same building and provide opportunities for GamerHaus students to be exposed to all the programs and events we do hopefully inspiring pipeline development for the jobs that are discussed in another update further down this list.
We welcome our first cohort of 11 students to campus in August and you can check out our program page at https://ou.edu/esports/facilities/gamerhaus-community.
OU ECCI ORGANIZATION RESTRUCTURED
Heading into Fall 2024 we see another stabilizing evolution expanding our marketing team from one to two, adding in an internal scheduling coordinator, and centralizing Media & News, Production, and Influencer Development into the new Creative Content department. We also rebranded Intercollegiate Esports to Competitive/Competition. This makes OU ECCI programs easier to explain in that there are now only three between Creative Content, Community & Labs, and Competition.
The Creative Content rework is to focus on developing our media centric efforts into more of a platform for the entire ECCI collective to leverage with more autonomy and more freedom to cross collaborate and promote their department inspired content while still retaining their independent freedom to create media for their interests.
OU ESPORTS & GAMING VENUE OPENS FOR 7 DAYS A WEEK STARTING IN AUGUST
This past March we soft launched our venue to the campus to great fanfare. However, the timing was less than ideal but we wanted to start getting the word out and start maturing our processes building this business extension of ourselves from scratch. This would allow us to train a core group of student champions that would help build a stronger team to head into the upcoming year as we promote the venue and the jobs to support it too. Click on the image next to this text to see our facility overview, hours, prices, and membership packages. On August 12th at 11AM the venue opens for full week operations for the first time with public access on weekends retaining campus only hours Monday-Friday.
To see a recap of the March soft launch, head to https://esports.ougamers.org/2024/03/29/the-latest-chapter-a-look-at-the-ou-esports-gaming-venue-launch/!
STUDENT JOBS RAMPING UP & FINANCIAL STRATEGY
Many looking at investing in their futures are also looking for as much financial support as they can acquire and as we see history repeat itself in a lot of way with traditional athletics programs, many universities now offer scholarship or other forms of financial assistance specifically for esports students in competition. From Spring 2021 through Fall 2023, OU ECCI was similar. There are many ways universities can strategize these incentive programs from leveraging central funding tuition dollars, sponsorships, and fundraising efforts to name a few methods. For OU ECCI specifically, we have raised over $170,000 in scholarship awards since January 2021 with university and the ECCI director focusing on infrastructure resources such as physical spaces, partnerships on campus, and further university buy-in and support. However, all of that fundraising was the result of student leadership searching and working to raise those funds. Unfortunately, that chapter of student leadership were all parts of the pre-pandemic era and due to the complete cultural disruption that motivation has not fully resumed since and has resulted in Fall 2023 being the last semester of scholarships until teams get to fundraising their own needs for the next couple of years.
At the end of the Fall 2023 semester, Director Moog worked on creating jobs leveraging different eligible budget buckets to enable our leadership, production, influencer development, media & news, and community & labs rosters to enter into hourly rate positions in preparation for mid Spring 2024 semester and on evolutions. While the majority of prospective students look at “esports scholarships” as rewarding performance in competition exclusively we had an equal stance on the need to develop students for the industry support needed to make a league, event, entertainmnent segment, or competitive series function. With these changes and effective by the time you read this over 30 students are being onboarded into jobs for those areas as a strategy shift in how we incentivize student recruitment, retention, and development. While ECCI as a whole is working towards revenue generation goals with our upcoming venue soft launch, future venue renovation, and support from OU Advancement and Licensing. these expansions will become self-sustaining through leveraging our growing resources.
Regarding our intercollegiate esports program and the competitors on teams, they have been given the keys to the kingdom, a workforce that can market, put on events, produce live streams, and write interviews, at their request allowing them to set a $2K fundraising goal retain 90% of the earnings and the staff get paid for their time. This allows teams to fundraise effectively which will always be an essential item just like any other extra curricular throughout life. Additionally, they are now only limited to their availability in time and creativity. As OU ECCI completes it’s own fundraising campaigns for venue renovation and job stabilization it will snap back to fundraising for student incentive programs like travel abroad, scholarships, room & board waivers, training, team travel, and more!
This means from Fall 2024 on these areas of our developments will be vetted and applied for within OU ECCI as we have always done then they will be on-boarded through OU HR for payroll as our standard. This also means that roster size caps will start being enforced to maintain scalability and effiecient workforce numbers on retainer.
WEBSITE REFRESH AND REMIX
Our home on OU.edu got a massive refresh for the new year. Take look at ou.edu/esports now!
Our media, news, and teams outlet on Sooner Esports got some small navigational tweaks as we centered all our programs there thanks to the new ou.edu templates. Take a look at sooneresports.org now!
NOTABLE AWARDS & EVENTS
ALUMNI BOARD HOSTS DEVELOPMENT CAMP
One of the main initiatives the Alumni Advisory Board had for Spring 2024 was to launch the inaugural Professional Development Workshop. Over 40 students among the development students signed up for a Saturday afternoon in April to learn from the Advisory Board members who drove in from Arkansas, Texas and all over Oklahoma to share their experience and knowledge. Alumni Justin Lombardo, Nolan Richardson, Lorenzo Ricchi and Anita Ly came together and provided communication and presentation skills, LinkedIn and job searching tips, interview best practices and a hands-on resume building activity. After five hours, many of the students remarked that the workshop was more useful than any of the other professional development workshops they have participated in. The Board member’s goals were to demonstrate how the skills development students were gaining whether as competitive gamers, gaming journalists, producers, or influences, could be showcased on their resume in a respectable and meritable manner. As OU ECCI focuses on the path to careers, the Board has been advising development students on establishing that initiative.
OKLAHOMA CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL x OU ECCI IMPACTS
The Oklahoma Children’s Hospital is one of OU ECCI’s closest and most cherished partners. Our ongoing partnership allows us to extend our community’s reach, giving back to kids in treatment and recovery at our peer OU Health institution in the city. A primary effort and goal of our programming is to incorporate philanthropy consistently and effectively, and this has been the perfect avenue to turn that vision into reality.
The Fall semester held witness to over 450 hours of individual community service hours in a wide variety of events and opportunities. Most notably and further detailed was Esports Bedlam 2023, which opened the door for students from both OU and OSU to contribute countless hours of communuity service while simulatenously raising funds for them. Throughout the semester, a group of students worked on developing a personalized Minecraft world that recreates The Child Life Zone and offers a collection of minigames for kids in the hospital to play! Our competitive teams were also encouraged to create kid-friendly, gaming content for the hospital’s CCTV, and one of our Splatoon players was the first to show what that could look like! Lastly, every two weeks a small group of students from the OU Gaming Club visited The Children’s Hospital for miscellaneous activities, such as Bingo, Mario Kart Tournaments, Halloween Trick-or-Treating, and interactive gaming with patients!
As we head into the Spring semester, we strive to be more intentional with our events and activities. We have developed a semester-long calendar of events that we plan to follow through with, including things such as members of our Stream Team livestreaming from the hospital to the CCTV, PC building content pieces for live demonstrations and recordings to be played on CCTV, and Chess classes for beginners and intermediates of the game. We hope to get as many members of our development and community engaged with this partnership in a variety of mediums to positively impact the most kids in the hospital!
Splatoon CCTV Video
OU CALL OF DUTY, HALO, & VALORANT TEAMS TRAVEL
While our teams competed across varying leagues these three teams attended physical LAN events after fundraising their own expenses to make it happen. Here is how they did:
- The Call of Duty team attended the CCL $2000 LAN in Knoxville, Tennessee at the end of April. At the event there were 12 of the best College Call of Duty teams present all competing. OU CoD traveled 12 hours across the country making memories along the way to the venue. The format was a two-day tournament took place with pool play and bracket play and OU CoD eventually fell out of the tournament with a T6 placing.
- The Halo team traveled over 10 hours to attend a LAN invitational located at the University of Soutnern Mississippi. Only select colleges were chosen from previous semester rankings ensuring competitiveness was high. This tournament lasted 2 days where OU Halo unfortunately fell short placing T7. However, they made the most of it by creating bonds and memories that will last for a lifetime.
- The Valorant team embarked on an 11-hour journey to Huntsville, Alabama (shoutout to Tulsa Tag for the support!) to compete for a $1,000 prize against the top 8 schools in the Southeast region. The tournament, lasted 16 hours, featured a single-elimination, best-of-three format, leading up to a best-of-five in the finals. After a day of intense competition, we reached the grand finals but narrowly missed victory, losing in a nail-biting map 5 of the best-of-five.
"SOONER DOJO SERIES", A COLLECTION OF EVENTS FOR THE FULL YEAR
We have always tried to work with preexisting energies and cultures before finding the compromises needed to evolve it out of grassroots energies and into a strategic intention for OU ECCI’s efforts. However, there is one event and org that predated our existence and timeline that we worked diligently to befriend, collaborate with, and eventually bring into the walls of our collective. Back in the early 2010’s a student org called “Sooner Smash Bros.” formed and started hosting weeklies and they persisted all the way until our creation and collaboration in 2017. After several events we agreed to join force, assimilate the org into the “Esports Association at OU”, our name at that time, and bolster our resources. That weekly, affectionally called “SOONERS” short for “Sooner Smash Dojo” still lives on today! Now a stable event happening in our venue every Friday night, it has expanded to include FGC titles like Guilty Gear: Strive, Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, and Mortal Kombat 1 with a consistent 30-40+ in attendance and running no less than 40+ weeks out of the year on it’s own.
With our shift into opening a daily operational facility with staff this event will inspire a new generation of marketing and promotion. For the decade plus old “Sooner Smash Dojo”, we will rebrand our collective event structure to be called the “Sooner Dojo Series” with the modifier at the end of “Smash Edition, FGC Edition, Chess Edition, Madden Edition, etc.” This allows us to not forget student intention and passion before our time while evolving it to help support more students. This allows us to scale up our events that are marketable, have consistency in execution and expectation, open to the public, and have revenue generating potential. This will also create path ways for more flagship events that we can lump in together bigger monthlies, yearlies, and campus activations like intramurals and tailgates. We will have a ton more on this before this semester is over as the series will also be available for sponsorships for a 12 month calendar of events compromised of over 45 weeks of events throughout the year and having diverse audience targets. Stay tuned for more details on this! Check out the event branding teaser. These are NOT final, YET!
AREA SPECIFIC UPDATES
COMMUNITY & LABS
COMMUNITY & LABS LEADERSHIP
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AN UPDATE FROM THE COMMUNITY & LABS COORDINATOR
Another semester, another great success (any Borat enjoyers in the chat?). Spring 2024 was one for the books as we continued elevating the opportunities available to both our community and the students in our development. Most notably, the grand opening of The OU Esports & Gaming Venue was an incredible milestone: A new home for gamers on campus and payroll for ambassadors for the first time in our program’s history. Tack on the additional developments we’ve been working on in the background like GamerHaus and study abroad, and wow. Yeah, we’re cooking. Every year is more important than the last, which means we need to do things bigger and better, and that’s exactly what I plan to do with the community and labs team in the 2024-25 year. More chances for students to express themselves with more events and get-togethers, more opportunities for our students to make money, and ultimately work on growing The Gaming Club as a collective. With all of the passion combined within ECCI, we can easily do this.
FALL '23 RECAP
– 22 Student Ambassadors
– 5-7 Weekly Event Average
– 75 Discord Events
– 80 Physical Events
– 24-26 Average Attendance for Events
COMPETITION
INTERCOLLEGIATE ESPORTS LEADERSHIP
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UPDATE FROM THE INTERCOLLEGIATE ESPORTS COORDINATOR
When Esports is mentioned the image that often comes to mind is a young, nerdy looking boy in a dark room, with pale skin, leaning into a too bright screen. The competitive pillar of OU ECCI is breaking this mold. At OU we develop students athletes in a social, team environment meant to cultivate the best in a player – both in and out of game. We focus on physical and mental conditioning, positive goal setting, and education first initiatives to create a culture for every student to thrive in. As a program we have maintained above a 3.10 GPA since we started to track student academics, won over 60% of our matches, and raised over $10,000 in funding to send students to tournaments all over the country. We compete in 19 titles ranging from the complexity of League of Legends to the fast-pased chaos of Splatoon 3. At OU, esports is not just about winning, and is about so much more then saying we have “the gaming scene”. Here, we develop skills, create professionals, and foster a culture of belonging.
SPRING '24 RECAP
- 20 Titles
- 31 Teams
- 136 Students
- 897 Matches Played
- 13.5hr/wk Average Team Activity
WIN/LOSS DATA
CREATIVE CONTENT
CREATIVE CONTENT LEADERSHIP
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UPDATE FROM THE MEDIA & NEWS COORDINATOR
At OU ECCI, there has always been a focus on developing students beyond competitive esports. In the past, this effort has been partially accomplished through the Media & News, Production, and Streaming Pillars. These pillars taught students from a plethora of majors the art and standards of article writing, video making, live streaming, and more. In addition, students have always been able to grow their leadership and project management skills, giving them tools that will take them far beyond the classroom.
Now, these three pillars are joining together and creating the Creative Content Pillar. As your first Co-Managers of the pillar, Sam and I are excited to be able to lead this new chapter of media creation at OU ECCI. This change will not only continue our history of academic prowess, visibility, and involvement, but allow current and future teams under the pillar to have the resources for greater consistency, experimentation, and monetary support. Our goal is to amplify the diverse voices and stories within OU ECCI and the greater gaming culture while creating an environment where everyone feels safe to be their true selves.
SPRING '24 RECAP
– 8 Media Team Students
– 6 News Team Students
– 12 Articles Produced
– 5 Videos Produced
– 16,673 Views
– 6 Producers and/or Shoutcaster Students
– Over 30 Matches Produced
– Over 125 Hours Produced
– 15-30 Average Viewership
ALUMNI BOARD
UPDATE FROM THE ALUMNI BOARD CHAIR
When the OU ECCI Program first started, the focus was getting to the next milestone and building the brand and reputation of collegiate esports. The OU Esports Alumni Advisory Board was created in June 2023 to support initiatives for the program by leveraging the global alumni network. This past Spring semester, the goal was to create pathways to career opportunities, provide professional development workshops, contribute in fundraising efforts, etc. In addition to the inaugural Professional Development Workshop, the Board contributed and attended the Venue Launch, donated to giveaways, and provided career support for graduating seniors. As the program and venue continues to develop in Fall 2024, the Board plans to reiterate workshops and join in the fundraising efforts for upcoming developments.
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SUPPORT OUR STUDENTS - THE SOLIDUS FUND
100% of the funding currently for all of the Solidus Scholarships comes from contributions from alumni, sponsorships, and supporters of our program. In respecting their wishes and community taking care of this program, 100% of those funds were put directly into these scholarships exclusively. This keeps the direct pipeline of contributions to the Solidus Fund purely aimed at impacting student opportunity and achievement. In the spirit of our namesake “for the community, by the community”. Funding for operations, staffing, and other budgets will come from other sources.
STATEMENT OF TRANSPARENCY
Even with our amazing numbers and all this positive energy we want to make sure we are being transparent. While these program averages are amazing, students sometimes do miss the mark and often have to step away from our program due to lack of focus on their academic goals and primary purpose for being at OU. We take their academic endeavors seriously and are always our #1 priority over performance and participation within OU ECCI. However, we also know that separating students away from things like this can be demoralizing and further push them down the path of unrecoverable failure. As we keep active tabs on all of our students in programs we actively work with them to ensure their balance and needs are met. From mental health concerns and academic performance to social time and fellowship we continuously aim to promote a culture of camaraderie and scholarly achievement in tandem with our success in development. These numbers reflect allstudents in programs regardless of being academically eligible or on probation as they reprioritize their focus.
– Director Moog
