SEMO's Esports club offers many marketable skills beyond fun, games

Southeast Missouri State University's Esports club boasts over 500 members and is one of the largest student organizations on campus.

The club's gaming room, the Arena, is located on the first floor of the Towers Complex residence hall and has over a dozen desktop computers set up for the optimum gaming experience, as well as walls of flat-screen TVs connected to a variety of consoles for playing the latest Nintendo, Xbox and PlayStation games.

Ricky Reed, assistant director of the university's Competitive Sports and Conferences-Recreation Services, said SEMO's Esports club has 16 teams competing with other universities in multiple games, including League of Legends Call of Duty and Nintendo's Super Smash Bros.

Reed said there is no membership fee to join the Esports club and the university provides all the computers, consoles and games, as well as covering any competition or travel fees. He said any prize money the students win is theirs to keep.

The competition structure for Esports is similar to college athletics with divisions, conferences and leagues. Reed said SEMO competes against universities from across the country, but mainly in the Midwest Conference.

"For example, next week we play Iowa State in a game called Valorant, and we're playing Louisiana State tomorrow in Super Smash Bros," Reed said.

However, not all the club's 500 members are there for the competition. Reed said the majority of members are casual players.

Lizzy Hall, a junior at SEMO, said she joined SEMO's Esports as a way to make friends and have fun.

"I met some club members at a campus Involvement Fair my freshman year," Hall said. "They invited me to the Arena to play some Mario Kart and it was fun and I met a lot of cool people, and from there I was a part of the club."

Since then, Hall has become more involved in other aspects the club offers, such as becoming an officer, and taking part in livestreaming broadcasts of the gaming competitions platforms, such as Instagram, YouTube and Twitch.

Hall is an eduction major and said she didn't think she'd be interested in the "tech" side of the club, but they need volunteers so she stepped up.

"Now I'm president of the club's content team so I run all of our broadcasting on our Twitch streams and I'm over a lot of the social media aspect of the club," Hall said.

After graduating from SEMO, Hall said she hopes to teach high school while pursuing a master's in school counseling. She said the skills she's learned through SEMO's Esports club will make her more valuable to schools.

"Whatever school I end up at I'll want to be a big part of their Esports club, and if they don't have one, I'll start one," Hall said.

Reed said there are many other skills students can explore and develop as members of the Esports club.

"Of course, we have students pursuing careers in computer science," Reed said. "But we also have communications and journalism majors working in the broadcasting and social media side, we have marketing and digital graphics majors working on our branding designs, and even political science majors who have delved into the clubs parliamentarian roles."

Hall added that any degree a student pursues can benefit from the basic communication, conflict resolution and team building skills learned in SEMO's Esports Arena.

"There's a wide range of experiences, not just playing video games, things you can take from the club, whatever you want to put into it," Reed said. "Students can take that experience and translate it into any career, not just Esports."