There were about 100 high school students competing on the first day of the Gauntlet and another 200 students are expected to participate today. Teams from all over North Dakota and a team from Minnesota are participating, going head-to-head in games like Rocket League, Valorant, League of Legends, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Chess.

Dr. Ethan Valentine, assistant professor of psychology at Minot State. and a number of students took the first step to integrating esports into the MSU campus in the spring of 2022 by starting an esports club.

“We began the club in the spring of 2022 and were able to get funding from the university starting this year,” said Valentine.

Esports is one of the fastest growing sports in the world, turning into a more than $3 billion industry since gaining major popularity in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Major esports tournaments gain upwards of 3 million views and the 2023 League of Legends Championship had a staggering 6.4 millions views, according to Statista. With the growth of esports around the world, gamers began looking to their universities to legitimize esports as a college sport.

Briana Romfo, Minot State University Esports Valorant captain, livestreams the high school competition.

With the funding from MSU and a number of dedicated sponsors, the esports program was able to stage the Gauntlet, which will showcase another competition Saturday, April 20, and Sunday, April 21, for college students.

“We’ve traveled to Jamestown, Fargo and all these other places for tournaments, and they do a great job but there is nothing else really in our area other than Jamestown,” Valentine said. “We wanted to have a spot in the circuit so we started talking about setting this up.”

The original hope was to host the tournament in Aleshire Theatre, but given the recent upgrades to Hartnett Hall where the theater is located, the theater was not yet ready to use. So they were able to split the event between Hartnett Hall and the MSU Dome.

“We were able to work with Bytespeed, Lenovo as well as SRT and other community support which is really important when it comes to making connections with the community as a whole,” Valentine said.

Building community is one of the most important things to Valentine and the esports program, and is a big reason why they decided to host a high school tournament before the college tournament starts on Saturday.

“These are students who historically have not had a good space on college campuses,” Valentine said. “There hasn’t been a good organizing body to do that. The competitive season ends in February for high school students so opening up a high school tournament was one of our first decisions. It also gives us, as a university, a chance to show off our campus and talk to these students about esports and show them who we are as a program while also giving them the opportunity to compete towards the end of the school year.”

The tournament goes from 8 a.m to around 5 p.m., and although they have classes throughout the day, the college students in the esports program came in between classes and supported the high school students. This gave them the opportunity to speak with the students and tell them about their program or simply to bond over gaming.

“We’ve had about 10 of our students in and out in between classes today and all of them across different majors. We have students from education, music, bioinformatics and more. There’s this perception that you have to be in computer science to be in esports but that really is not the case,” Valentine said. “The truth is that we have this wide breadth of majors. We aren’t just recruiting high school students interested in computer science, we recruit students who are interested in esports.”

The interest in esports allows for these students from different backgrounds and majors to do something they love while being in an environment that prioritizes building community and creating a space of true belonging.

“Really, the hope is to build community and build a space for people to belong,” Valentine said, “and to belong in a way that welcomes you no matter who you are.”