PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — For Bill Rodgers, being at the forefront of the esports explosion is like "having a pocket full of Bitcoin in 2008."
The 24-year-old officially became director of Arcadia University's nascent esports program last June. However, he's been there since the beginning.
During his student days at Arcadia, Rodgers was part of the swim team. But he found a new interest during his upperclassman years that would change his life.
"I got pretty into Hearthstone, a [digital] competitive card game, and there was a collegiate league for it," he recalled. "I signed me and my roommates up, we played from our dorm room, and that was essentially the first Arcadia esports team."
Rodgers graduated with a degree in business administration, and briefly went on to a career in marketing. But he found his passion was in esports, and returned to his alma mater as a Hearthstone coach. He was quickly promoted to assistant director and served under Tim Beloff for two years before becoming Arcadia's esports head.
In addition to shepherding the program, Rodgers has continued to coach its Hearthstone team. Under his watch, the Knights captured NECC Hearthstone Champions Division gold last spring.
Rodgers stopped by the KYW Newsradio original podcast "1-on-1 with Matt Leon" to talk about his career, what drew him to esports, and what it takes to run a successful collegiate esports program. You can listen to the full episode above. The following is a lightly edited excerpt of the conversation.
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Matt Leon: You guys compete in six different games [in esports]. Am I correct?
Bill Rodgers: Yes, so we compete in "League of Legends," "Overwatch," "Rocket League," "Hearthstone," "Super Smash Bros." and "Rainbow Six Siege." We are always looking for the next move. We move a little bit slower than some other institutions in terms of adding games because we have a part time dedicated head coach for each game, which is a big differentiator for us, something we're really proud of.
But ... when you look to [add] a new game, it's not as easy as just getting five students together and saying, "Alright, you're a 'Valorant' team, go after it." We have to make sure that all those ducks lined up in a row. And that's what we're always trying to do is keep our finger on the pulse.
To the point of the games ... is it more you have to find a league or you pick the game and make it work from there, if you understand what I'm saying? What do you prefer from a competition standpoint? Are there kind of standard games that you kind of have to plug into to compete? Or can you pick a game and kind of grow it out from your direction?
Yes, so one of the pillars of our deciding factor on what we wanted to do for games in order to get a game approved, we have to prove that it has a sustainable competitive ecosystem in collegiate [esports]. Games that we already have definitely have those leagues that compete and then it's kind of up for us to decide which leagues we compete in. We're currently members of NACE, which is the National Association of Collegiate Esports ... National Esports Collegiate Conference, I want to give them credit, they do a good job.
And we're also working on competing in local competition as well. We just helped run the Middle Atlantic Invitational, which is basically the Middle Atlantic Conference, which I'm sure you may be familiar with, schools like Widener, Arcadia, Alvernia. We just competed in the first-ever championship for that conference, which hasn't officially been sanctioned yet, but we're working on doing things like that.
So I'm curious, how many athletes do you have? How many kids do you have in your program right now, total?
Around 50, so about 47-48.
Is that your ceiling? Is that a fluid number depending upon how many games you're competing in, and what the season looks like?
Yes, so the only limiting factor on ceiling is how many support staff we have. I mean, esports is incredible in the sense that you can enter multiple teams into multiple leagues. So I can have my A-team for "Rocket League" and a B-team and a C-team and a D-team. And they can all play their own full season, right? They might not get all of the social media accolades as the A-team does.
But you know, you look at a sport like lacrosse, sometimes people come to school for lacrosse, they don't touch the field for four years. It's not the same way for esports so it really fosters like this dynamic of just blowing up the roster, and making it massive and then kind of just looking back to the school and being like, 'Well, let's give more support to help the students.' A school like Arcadia has been fantastic at that. We've definitely been upping our support over the years as the roster grows, and any school that is able to back that up should do really well in esports.
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Facility-wise, what do you need to run a successful esports department and esports group?
In college?
Yes.
OK, that's a that's a big distinguisher. At the collegiate level, I'd recommend at least 18 to 24 computers, just to manage being able to play multiple games at the same time. Because you'll have nights where, you know, we've had nights where we got 30-some people at out computer stations ... we have 46 PCs here at Arcadia, we're definitely blessed. We're definitely one of the nicer facilities in the area for sure. So we have a lot of flexibility in terms of when they can practice.
Other teams, not so lucky. If you have 12 computers, you're going to be scrambling and really having to work scheduling a lot harder than I do. So I'd say 18 to 24. It's probably a sweet spot.
A slept-on factor in an arena, that I can recommend any school looking to build one, is floor space, I think people underrate the value of floor space. They love to throw computers in a room and then don't have a lot of floor space. So that's a fun fact.
With traditional sports, when it comes to recruiting, there are hot beds. You know, with football, western Pennsylvania, Texas, California, there are places that coaches are always going to have on the list regardless of what you need. Are there those types of areas when it comes to esports?
They're forming. I can say right now for "Rocket League," we are living in a beautiful area for Rocket League players. I have no shortage of Rocket League players in my recruiting list. I have no shortage of Rocket League players interested.
Funnily enough, "League of Legends" kind of struggles in this area just because - I mean, this is a very loaded topic, but there's a lot of schools that give full rides and League of Legends is one of those games where your roster is gonna have to be full ride if you want to compete at the top level and not a lot of schools around here give those full rides. So I think League of Legends in the area is generally weaker than a lot of other sports at the college level. Some of the bigger schools, the Drexels, the Temples, they they throw together pretty good rosters but that's just off of sheer student size.
But we're definitely sitting in a Rocket League hotbed. "Super Smash Bros.," you know, there's a really big Philadelphia circuit for "Super Smash Bros." Recruiting is all flowing as time goes by too. It's all changing. It's all year by year.
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Take me through an average in-season day for an esports athlete at Arcadia. [Is it] like basketball or soccer? You've got your two, two and a half hour practice? Maybe it's preceded or followed by meetings? Obviously, we're in weird times with a pandemic, but is everybody together? Can guys train in their dorm room? How does it work?
Generally, they're all together. It is admittedly a little bit less than your traditional athlete schedule. And I'll be the first one to admit that because I did double six days a week for swimming, right? I was in the pool 30 hours a week. There's an innate level of allowing that flexibility to occur because, you know, I wasn't going in and swimming extra laps in my free time. And a lot of these students are going home and gaming anyway.
So instead of doubling up and doing six days a week or doubles, we are doing four days a week of practice, and then allowing that time for them to express themselves in gaming in their free time. We don't want to ruin gaming for them entirely. We want to help it be a resource for them to be successful students overall.
So the typical day is, they'll wake up - we really try to get them to schedule their classes in the morning. So hopefully they have a nice 8 a.m. class [as] the day is getting started. Then right around 4 p.m., our open hours will end and varsity practice will start.
So around 4 p.m., they'll come in, they might warm up an hour or two before a game and then if they have practice, they'll either do film study, scrimmages or inter-squad scrimmages, or just playing ranked games together. Then after that, it's usually just a nice little powwow about how the day went. The coaches are all new and improving as well, so a lot of times, the coaches ask for feedback, and we're all just kind of growing together.
One thing is, you know, you're not building that cardio base, like you are for other sports, right? Like, if I take a day off of Rocket League, I'm probably going to be OK after five minutes of warming up again. Whereas if I took a day off of swimming, I was out for two weeks until I came back to full force. People are collecting a lot of data behind it.
At the college level, it's a little bit different than at the pro level. These gamers are playing a full-time job's worth of games, but we really, really want them to be successful here. And that's something that we push.
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