Mike Dahle: Welcome to the first Future Friday interview series. Joining me today is Dylan Gentilcore from UW River Falls. Thank you, Dylan, for being our guinea pig on our video interview series, where we learn about different post-secondary pathway opportunities for our students. My first question for you is, can you give us an introduction about who you are and your journey to where you are at River Falls and how you got there?
Dylan Gentilcore: I'm not a Wisconsin native, so it's been a huge journey to make this leap.
My background started like a lot of people in my position, as a kid. I was two or three years old when I started playing the Super Nintendo with my dad. From there it became one of my biggest hobbies and passions, constantly following video games, whether it was following my favorite single-player games.
Back then, I was always looking at magazines at the grocery store while my mom was getting ready for checkout, then moving on to following things across all these different video game journalist websites. All my favorite magazines became websites, and then going to college and having really fast internet for the first time and being able to play League of Legends way too much and follow the pro scene all the way back to the beginning of season 2 and those early IEMs, with teams like Gambit, back then, Moscow 5, and CLGU at some of those big tournaments.
It's been a huge passion of mine that once I got into teaching after getting my master's in teaching at Earlham College, I was able to really connect with students and bridge the gap between something that I had always loved and cherished and never really had the opportunity to pursue competitively and something that I was seeing a really large subset of my student population wanted to explore.
That's where we put together the first esports program at our high school. I was at Carmel High School in Indiana. We had a lot of success in a very short amount of time there. After doing that for four years, I transitioned to looking at collegiate opportunities. I'd gotten to know a lot of different college esports directors and coaches over my time at Carmel, people like Garrett from Manchester University, Colin who's now at Mizzou who's formerly at Davenport, Riley who now is the head director of NACE, one of the largest college esports leagues in the country. He was a college director out of the Michigan area.
"This job was truly one of the hidden gems when it went up for posting a few years ago. That's because when they conceived the position and the program, they really wanted it to integrate directly in athletics just like any other new sport."
Being able to meet so many awesome peers and really mentors propelled me to look at, hey, could I work as a collegiate esports coach and help students access these opportunities at a higher level and just with more support and a greater focus than I was ever able to do as a teacher, juggling all my other responsibilities.
Dahle: So you came on up here to Wisconsin to join us. In your first couple seasons here at UW River Falls, can you talk about that early transition as a collegiate director, what barriers you had to overcome transitioning out of the classroom into this collegiate role, and how those first couple of years went with competitive schedules, practices, and how your program has evolved over this short period of time?
Gentilcore: I always tell people this, and I really do mean it. This job was truly one of the hidden gems when it went up for posting a few years ago. That's because when they conceived the position and the program, they really wanted it to integrate directly in athletics just like any other new sport. We've since added men's baseball and men's soccer, which I know feels weird to say like esports came before those at UWRF, but we follow the same game plan every time.
What it is is they give that new coach a year to come in and prepare themselves for the responsibilities ahead: to really build out that program vision from the ground up, to get to know all of their resources on campus, to build better relationships with the schools and the pipelines around them so they can begin recruiting high schoolers as well as other college students already on campus and at other universities looking for those transfer opportunities.
I spent that first year doing a lot of that work, and that really set me up for success, I think, in a lot of ways that other program directors don't get to experience. So I would say that was a fundamental building block and stepping stone for me, having that time to come in, get to know all these students at UWRF who loved gaming and wanted to pursue it competitively. I started spending time to get to know all of the people in the area.
We're in a very unique spot. I live in Hudson. I'm right next to the St. Croix River. If I look up, I can see Minnesota from the desk I'm sitting at. So, it's awesome to be in a space where I've gotten to know the people in Minnesota, the people in Wisconsin, and see just how rich the ecosystem is for people who love public education and also competitive video games.
As far as our program goes in terms of getting it to that competitive standing, we really focused on finding students who wanted to make that commitment and then going head first into as many titles and competitions as possible. That's something I've always been a big supporter of: if I have enough students who want to pursue something, I'm going to find a way to make it happen.
So, we've always, over these past two years and now heading into our third season, competed in as many titles as possible. We do that with just players playing in one game at a time. We don't operate like some other programs where we're stretching our players really thin, maybe competing on Overwatch and League of Legends simultaneously while subbing for Valorant. What we do is, if you're on a roster, you are starting on that roster, you are attending practices and matches full-time for that roster, and then if we need you to be an emergency sub in case of some uncontrollable scenario, then we account for that. But for the most part, our students get to focus on one game.
We have a coaching structure where myself at the head position, I've staffed out seven or eight assistant coaches — I think right now we're at seven — that work with all of our other titles and provide them with the leadership and the mentorship that the students need. So we're scheduling the scrims, we're scheduling the practices, we're running the match days, and we're making sure that the students have that built-in experience that feels and works just like any other of the 20 sports we have on campus.
As far as competition goes and practice, we try to keep it Monday through Thursday. Our students have been really active in integrating into that system; it's a grind. We try to really pace ourselves because the marathon of competing both semesters can take a toll if we don't do that. We try to make sure that students have opportunities for rest during the season. I know that physical fatigue isn't a huge part of what we do, but there is a huge mental strain, and we also build out some moments where they can get to know their teammates and their coaches a bit better.
So, it's been really awesome joining all these different leagues, starting the Wisconsin Esports Conference with some other coaches in the state, and helping our students flourish in in-person and online competition at our program.
Dahle: Give us a little insight. You briefly talked Monday through Thursday. How many hours a week are you actually having students in a focused practice, and how many hours a week are they then competing?
Gentilcore: I love the way you put that, "focused." I think that's where the decision is really deliberate on my part. When I first started, I had a vision of us trying to do this five days a week, maybe even six or seven depending on the schedule at the time of year.
I've since, as of the beginning of last year and continuing into this year, really tried to stick us firmly in that 4-day a week time slot because the focus is so much higher. There's a lot of intentionality to what we do, and we try to stick to those structures that we put in place.
"I think some teams get caught up in that like we just have to scrim every night, three to four hours a night. Okay, how many of those hours, though, are wasted? How many of them are unproductive...?"
So, when I work with my assistant coaches about designing their team schedule, it really is looking at, first off, which leagues are we competing in for your title? Are we just doing one league such as Rainbow Six? They're just in Midwest R6. That means my coaches Ricky and Nathan, they work together on that game, they now have three other days of the week that they know matches are on Thursday at 7 o'clock. So that's going to be a two to three hour window that students are locked in playing and competing. Now they need to figure out the other three nights, Monday through Wednesday, what they want that to look like.
Ideally, we keep it around two hours. Sometimes, you put two hours on the schedule, a scrim runs a little long because maybe we're waiting on someone from our team or their team or there was a technical difficulty. Maybe the teams just blabbed a little bit too much between maps. You start to go over things, and it gets a bit exhaustive. But we really try to make sure that it's about two to maybe three hours a night on a practice regime.
So you end up looking at a schedule that across the board is four nights a week, 8 to 12 hours per team. That's regardless of whether they're in one league or two leagues. Two leagues is pretty much the cap I put on teams. Our Rocket League teams are in NACE right now and experiencing national level competition there. They're also doing the WEC for that Wisconsin level competition. Those other two nights a week, they're scrimming, they're VOD reviewing, they're playing ranked if they need to. They're doing skill drills. Any additional time they want to put in outside of that, that's up to them. We always encourage them to be thoughtful about getting in some solo queue and trying to think about the things that we're working on in practice that week, but we want to make sure that there's not just a bunch of wasted hours so that we can feel like we're doing the performance of giving it our all.
I think some teams get caught up in that like we just have to scrim every night, three to four hours a night. Okay, how many of those hours, though, are wasted? How many of them are unproductive because how many of them are you actually reflecting upon your game play and looking mechanically to get better versus just going through the motions? So you can talk about how many hours over the past two that you've put in, and that's where we've really realized that, especially last year I think proved it, we had very tremendous results with our teams. This model that we've put in place with this limit on hours and leagues and time across our teams, it's been better across the board for our student athletes, for our coaching staff, and for the relationships and the culture that we're trying to build.
"We're a collegiate program, but my ideal scenario is that each of our players that matriculate in spend four years or, if they come in as a transfer, their remaining undergraduate degree time playing for the team and having an awesome experience."
Dahle: Culture is one of my favorite words, and to transition, as you've been building this culture for your program, what characteristics or mentality are you looking for when students are coming into your program? What are some of your expectations for them as part of that culture?
Gentilcore: This is the part where, me watching ESPN my whole life, I feel like I want to avoid the clichés. I think the thing I focus on the most is commitment. I think commitment encapsulates a lot of the characteristics and values that I'm personally trying to model for my players and coaches and what I'm hoping to cultivate in all of our student athletes.
That's just this idea that we're following through on the promises we've made to each other because in a competitive environment, if you don't have that trust, not just the trust that they're going to do what is asked of them, but that they're going to always be there.
The way esports teams typically start to fall apart, it's just the minor things accumulate: this person showing up five minutes late every single day, this person who on any given day they'll just be checked out, this person who, when they say they're going to play X amount of games outside of practice, they never do or they're always short. Those aspects begin to build, and over time that's what causes a lot of the riffs in teams, and that's why you see teams have to change it up a lot, and they try to go through these honeymoon periods and all of that.
We're a collegiate program, but my ideal scenario is that each of our players that matriculate in spend four years or, if they come in as a transfer, their remaining undergraduate degree time playing for the team and having an awesome experience. I think that really comes to fruition when they are committed and they follow through on their responsibilities to themselves, to their teammates, to their coaching staff. That means timeliness. That means availability. That means sticking to their word. That means when they're at practice, genuinely giving it their best, even if they had to pull an all-nighter to study for a test or to write a paper. They're still going to show up at 6:00 that night and give it the best that they have even though they're going to be drained. Afterwards, they can go right to sleep.
It means that they are doing that class component, that they're focusing on their grades, that they are making sure that they're never going to be in doubt for eligibility reasons because they're always going to be a full-time student in good academic standing. Those are the things that to me are the most vital aspect.
The reason I focus on those things first and foremost is because as a coach who employs a full coaching staff of non-students, it is our job to help you improve at the game. That's what we specialize in. That's what we're going to do. We're going to help you improve at the game mechanically. We're going to help you improve your game knowledge. We're going to help you be a better teammate. I just need you to commit to that receptivity and to following through on these responsibilities, and we can go from there.
Oftentimes if you start from the other end of the equation, it's like I just want the best players possible on paper and then try to mold them into the culture. That can be a little bit more dubious. So, the first spot that I always look at is, okay, let's have a conversation about what you're doing here at UWRF or what you want to do in college. What you're trying to accomplish with a college degree and education. The focus is, for me, bettering yourself. What is education? It's improvement. So, let's make sure you're committed to that aspect of it.
When I tell you, hey, we're going to ask you to be a part of this 8 to 12 hours a week, September through the end of April, that sounds like a good idea to you. That you're excited to be around other people and you're excited to come to the lab every night and talk to your teammates, to talk to your coaches, to talk to the people from the other rosters. When your practice is over and we're still streaming the Smash match that took place, maybe you're sticking around, you're watching the Smash team or you're volunteering to hop on the cast. Those are the aspects that I want to see from our players that, to me, are all tied to commitment.
Dahle: There are a couple of different directions I'd like to go based upon that answer. A quick and easy one would be, you talked about production, content creation, and social media marketing. Can you briefly touch on some of those other tertiary roles that are part of your program beyond just coaching and playing?
Gentilcore: Of course. Like any other program, we really know that a huge part of what we do is platforming our players, showing off what they're doing, making sure that all these matches that they're playing, which is in excess of 80 to 120 depending on the semester, that we're talking about them as much as we can. We're publishing content about them. We're giving them the opportunities to tell their stories and really just showing how hard they're working and how it's paying off.
As far as that goes, we stream four to five nights a week. We do have Overwatch games on Friday this semester. So, they're the only team that doesn't stick to Monday through Thursday. They take a day off in the middle of the week, so they still are operating four nights. But, what that means is that we have streams five nights a week now. That means that we have an opportunity for students to get involved in that. We have alumni who engage with that. We have students who are not involved with the program who volunteer their time and work on our streams and casts. We also have students who do it as part of internship credit.
That's something I've been able to work out with departments across campus, some of them in stage and screen arts, some of them in English. It's a pretty versatile approach to it because there is so much involved with it. As far as any other aspect, I've had students who have volunteered to do graphic design work, who are always giving me feedback on the things that I post about the teams and the things that they'd like to see from us.
I really like to be student-driven and give people the opportunities where we can. We've had videos that we've made for certain events on campus in the esports lab or around the program that have been made by the students themselves. I always love it when our players come up with highlight videos, and we have a TV out in the lobby, so we put a rotating display of those highlight videos on, and we try to make sure that we just have the opportunity to show off all the cool things that they're doing on a constant basis because to me, I just think that's the biggest thing that I can do for them.
Anything that I ask myself like, is this genuinely cool? I want to try to do it then. If the players come to me with a thought, I want to try to do it. If they have something that they're interested in, sometimes students want to hold events or sometimes just for people on campus. Sometimes they want to get involved with some of our other events that we host such as the MCS Championship. I get them involved. I have them come in to work on support throughout the event day, to hop on the cast once again, do production stuff, to table at these events. So, there's a lot of ways for students to get involved that don't correlate to actually playing the games or competing for us.
Dahle: I think that's been my favorite thing in esports over the last decade: learning some of these tertiary roles within this. I love broadcasting. I have learned that that is my jam. I was super nervous going into it, but it's quickly become one of those things where I'm like, somebody offered to take Fortnite away from me on Monday nights. I'm like, "No, no, no, no. It's okay. I really like this." That's awesome. I love getting students involved in other interests or at least getting them exposed to other opportunities within a program.
You briefly talked about your facility. Let's jump down there. Can you tell us what kind of setup you have at the university as far as equipment goes? You've talked a little bit already about some of your support staff as well as coaching staff that's there. Anything else you'd like to highlight about your school's resources?
Gentilcore: One of the big things that we focus on is really bringing the team together in our facility. That's our base of operations. Our players are practicing and playing from there every night. We don't have players who are just coming in remotely through Discord or anything. I think for us that helps build the type of culture that we want. It enforces that commitment aspect.
I think, when you're at this tangible meeting ground, that's going to open the door to opportunities. My Rocket League team right now is four freshmen, two sophomores, and a senior. They're getting food together already before practices. They're going to Jimmy John's across the street or they're driving across town to McDonald's. Those things are brought together by the fact that they always have to meet up at the lab together anyway. So, let's just do some other things too beforehand.
That's what I love about our facility. We're right in the middle of campus in the library, so we're close to the UC. We're close to some of the off-campus restaurants and things like that. For our students, it's a center point in terms of regardless of where you're living on campus. That's an equidistant point.
We have 26 PCs and three console stations in our main competition space. There's a classroom next door that sometimes our coaching staff will bring teams over to and utilize the multi-screen setup there to go over VODs or talk about, for me I use it for drafting for League of Legends sometimes. So we'll talk about strategy or game plans for any particular night. Across the hall, we do have a dedicated locker room space that is also our production studio. All of our players can store things in there. It's safe, and it's card access only for varsity team members.
We have three computers that we use for broadcasting, observing, and casting respectively. The reason I have it segmented like that is because for me, I like the level of redundancy, so to speak. I know, you've been in this position. I've been in this position where you're trying to run stream and casting and game all off of one computer, and then something goes wrong with one of those pieces, and then everything else starts to crumble around it. Maybe you have to restart the computer, and suddenly I have to take down the stream because my game crashed, and the only way to fix it is through a hard restart of the PC. So we have some more precautions in place as a result of that. We can also stream remotely from any of our computers as well. So we can pull in those feeds over the network using NDI. That's been really cool. It's been a great setup for us. It's done us well.
There are spaces where our students can hang out as well. A few tables across the rooms where students will, during the day, I'll be in, and they'll just be in that locker room doing homework because they need a quiet place to work, or sometimes they'll take their remote classes from there. So, if they have an online course with a professor, I'll walk by and I'll see Ethan, Jamie, and Nathan right now. Those are the three that I always see, and they're doing their online classes. People sitting at the front of the room even when they're not there for practice or something, eating, talking, hanging out, cheering on their teammates. So, across our two rooms, plus that classroom next door, which is always available for us in the evenings, those are the facilities that we leverage.
Our coaching staff, it's myself. I'm there every single night. I know that's a big ask for someone like myself. People are like, "Man, don't you have kids or anything?" The good answer is no, I don't. So, I'm not depriving them of my time, just occasionally upsetting my wife and dogs. Our other coaches, we kind of run a hybrid model. So, we have some coaches that are fully remote. We have some coaches that are close by, and they come in pretty often. We have some coaches that kind of bridge the gap, and they'll be remote some nights and in person some nights.
So, that's done really well in terms of students having those go-to people who they know are thinking deeply about their game but also always going to be there to support them, and then I'm also there to back them up. In a lot of ways, I like to think of myself as the assistant to my assistant coaches.
Dahle: That's awesome. You briefly talked on it, and so I'll make sure that I ask the parent-friendly question here: how do you help with academic balance? I think you did a great job highlighting a lot of the students using your space not only for gaming but also for academics and studies. Is there anything that you've ensured as part of your program to help high school students transition to college and then also maintain success while in your programming?
Gentilcore: I think the biggest thing is that you are held to a very high standard as a student athlete within the program. We have our dedicated compliance officer in athletics. We are always making sure that our students are staying on top of things.
As far as check-ins with students, I handle a lot of those personally. I'm checking in with students. I'm having the casual conversations every day. "Hey, how are classes going? How'd that test you were talking about last week go?" Those kinds of things just to let the students know that I really am genuinely interested in their academic pursuit at the university. So, those types of interactions help a lot. Then doing the more formal aspects like, "Okay, here, there's a bi-weekly form I want you to fill out. I also want to come by and manually check your Canvas courses with you. Make sure you don't have missing assignments, that you're not falling behind on your grades."
Sometimes those have to be just more personal conversations because, to be quite frank, I was a teacher at one time. I know what it's like. I was that guy who, you've done 15 assignments for me, and I've only graded five at the midterms. So, sometimes the way students' grades look is deceptive. So, I'm genuinely having interrogative sessions with them where I'm like, "Hey, so what's going on with this class you don't seem to be worried about right now?" Then I'm like, "Oh, yeah, okay. I can clearly see, yeah, your professor hasn't graded five of your assignments yet." That's what's going on there.
So I think for us that's been a big part of it: just me being that bridge to always talk to students about academics, first interest in their studies, and then the thing that's built up over the past two years with our students who came in as underclassmen and are now upperclassmen, and they've seen people graduate. They've seen people leave the program for various reasons. They are now really invested in always telling the freshmen and the sophomores, "Hey, you got to stay on top of this, guys. We've done it for the past couple of years. If you need help, let us know. But if you mess around, you're out of here." There's no wiggling this there. There's no looking at rounding up the GPA for this semester because you had a bad class. You need to make sure you're taking care of things so that we can rely on you going forward.
I think that comes back to the commitment piece I was talking about, where our players are more than ever actively talking to the younger players about that.
Dahle: That's awesome. I just want to preface, I don't know what you're talking about with grading. I graded everything promptly. (laugh)
Gentilcore: (laugh) Perfect teacher.
Dahle: I think that's awesome, and I think having the upperclassmen mentoring the incoming students as far as helping with that transition is extremely important. It means something different to students as it's coming from their peers and not necessarily the adult in the room, even though they are adults at this point.
Gentilcore: It really does.
Dahle: After four years of being in your position, you talked a little bit about some of your upperclassmen and some of your alumni coming back and supporting the program. Are there any success stories you've had or career paths that their role in your program has helped prepare them for?
"They were like, 'Those guys are the GOAT. Who are they?' And I'm like, 'They're some of your alumni. They were in your shoes a few years ago.'"
Gentilcore: One of them was pretty funny. Right after graduation, I had a student contact me and was like, "Hey, my old high school, they want me to come teach there and run the esports program and stuff." He ended up passing on that just because he also got another job offer, just too many good things at once.
But, it's been cool to see how many of my students have stayed in the area. Obviously, we're in the larger Twin Cities metro, so there are a lot of economic reasons for them to stay nearby. A lot of them have gone into jobs in IT, in networking. Some of them have started to get employment in other areas. We're just now starting to see our alumni across all these different spheres.
One of them ended up going to one of our competitors for grad school, which was cool to see. Jackson, he went to Carthage for grad school, and then now he's on that grind looking for business opportunities now that he has his MBA. So it's been great to see our alumni just go through this really challenging phase in their life in the job market. A lot of them are landing on their feet. They're getting their own places to live for the first time. They're messaging me talking about how cool it is that they're only 45 minutes from campus, so they can come back every now and then.
Last night we streamed our Rocket League matches. The two guys that came in were our alumni who like to come in almost every single week to cast our League of Legends games, but we had a bye in League of Legends last night, so I was like, "Hey, you want to stick around and cast some of these young bloods in Rocket League?" And they were like, "Oh, yeah. Yeah." They, these guys don't know a ton about Rocket League, but they're super energetic. They love talking about our students at UWRF. And they did a fantastic job. As the full freshman roster, we have a roster just of three freshmen, they finished up a really close series against UW Madison. They eked out a win at the last second. They came over, and they were just so hyped about these casters. They were like, "Those guys are the GOAT. Who are they?" And I'm like, "They're some of your alumni. They were in your shoes a few years ago."
So, I think that's been one of the coolest pieces for me when we're able to get that sort of interaction between our newer student athletes and the people that have walked in their footsteps before. We also try to cultivate that in the Discord server to a certain extent. So, we have, of course, the varsity section of the server, but then we've got a different segment carved out for alumni and former players on the team to be interactive with the current ones.
I just had one of our best Smash players from the past few years. He graduated in spring, and his teammate is now an assistant coach for us because he was also the other best player on the team who graduated in spring. But he's back in northeast Wisconsin, but we brought him in the other night on the iPad, and he was going over core and tech with one of our freshmen, helping her kind of figure out some of the more bread and butter things that she needs to go through, explaining some fundamental things, and it was just like a dedicated one-on-one session between the two of them for a couple hours during practice.
To me, that's been huge. I love seeing how it meant something to them to be a part of this. Anything that they want to give back or just interactions that they want to continue to have, I'm always going to try to find a way to support it.
Dahle: I will say I think one of my favorite things is to keep track of student success after these programs. I know you have a couple of Wisconsin kids coming down there as incoming freshmen, and it's one of those I'll tune in all the time. They weren't from my program at all, but watching some of them grow up, I'll shout out X-ray from Walden going to Carthage, or even Vault Destroyer that came through one of my programs when I was teaching and watching his success at UW Stout. I still tune into his stream every once in a while to just see how he's doing. That's really awesome to hear just how full circle everything is coming.
The last general question that I have here, as students are starting to consider their pathways and options, I guess I'm going to look at a two-part question here. Students are always trying to look to make sure that things are affordable. So the question regarding financial support, scholarships, or other services that are available there, but then also I really want to hear what kind of advice do you have for students that are looking to approach an esports program after high school and what they should do to help set themselves up for success.
Gentilcore: Cool. So part one, we are a Division III sport, and we operate just like one. Similar to every other student athlete on campus, our focus is getting you those academic and merit-based scholarships when you apply and are interested in us.
We're one of the lowest cost four-year institutions across Minnesota and Wisconsin, which is a huge boon. We're very transparent in our sticker price. We don't have hidden costs anywhere. Really low costs in terms of the res life and the meal plan. That makes a lot of sense for people. Our tuition is basically the lowest in the system, maybe second lowest. When you factor everything in, that total cost of attendance ends up being the lowest within the UW or the UM system. That's been really huge for our players who are looking for good value, and they want to be really sensible about not just choosing a college to go play video games at, but choosing a college that they're going to feel like the investment is going to pay off long term.
When they're here, we spend our time investing in them. In addition to making sure that they're in a program where they get to focus on one game, where they get that coaching staff, where they have that facility to play in with all the PCs and the consoles. We make sure that we're trying to get you to as many competitions as possible, whether it's, you're joining the Smash team and you're traveling the country for majors and regionals and even super majors.
We're probably going to take around 10 people to Genesis in San Jose, California. We pay for all of those expenses: flight, hotel, anything related to it. Only thing I ask is bring your controller, bring your jersey, bring some other fresh clothes, and then bring some money to eat some good food with your teammates. So we really try to be all-inclusive in the way that we help students have access to opportunities that they otherwise might not be able to afford.
Or it's our other rosters who are traveling to events in the Midwest such as Midwest Battlegrounds in the Chicago area. We took 20 players to that across Valorant, Overwatch, Rocket League, and Smash last semester. We're continuing to have tournaments pop up more and more in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois that are really easy for us to make day trips or weekend trips with any of our teams to, even as far as the Dakotas, we're starting to see some events pop up. We really push to support our student athletes with the opportunities, and that they're not having to choose between the cost of school and the cost of really trying to pursue esports at a high level.
"If you don't have a club or a team at your school, try to find that teacher who will start one. Advocate for it."
In terms of students who are thinking now, maybe they're a senior and they're busy in the midst of what can feel like a rapid-fire college application season, or they're a junior who is starting the prep to take the SAT or the ACT, or they're just really thinking about how they're going to spend this year wisely so they can have that good GPA on their junior year as they apply to colleges. Or you're an underclassman or below who's thinking long term like what are these programs that are even going to be available in a few years, which is a very valid concern you might want to have. Some of these college programs don't last as long as others when it comes to esports.
I would say really focus on building a good resume of character for yourself. That's going to be the most important piece, and I think it's going to continue to show over the next few years as more and more programs continue to flourish in Wisconsin and Minnesota. We're seeing more players coming from local high schools that genuinely have a background and experience in competitive esports scholastically as opposed to just can link me a solo queue tracker site, which was more common before these past couple of years.
Some of our freshmen that competed last night were right from St. Croix Central. They had competed in the Wisconsin High School Esports Association state championship. They were familiar with a lot of the other players in the WEC that were coming out of these high schools. So, they had that history, they had that background, and being able to talk to them about that experience, talk to their coaches, just to even talk to their teammates. That builds a huge foundation for programs to look at and be like, "Yeah, we really want to bring you in. We want to build around you. You're going to be a focal point of what we do because you're already bought into the idea of representing your school, of being a good teammate, of being someone who's highly coachable, who's committed to the schedule and the responsibilities that come with this.
“You're more likely to have juggled practice and studies than someone who maybe they slouched on their studies so they could play more solo queue and they'd never been in a team.” All of those different pieces matter a lot.
I would say really look to get involved at your school. Look to get involved in high school and even middle school esports if you can. If you don't have a club or a team at your school, try to find that teacher who will start one. Advocate for it. Talk to as many friends as you can to try and get something going because that is just the biggest piece of this. If we don't have players playing in high school and continuing to support their high school teams and everything, it's going to be a bleak future for higher ed esports.
From my angle, what I always try to do is support those high school programs, encourage players to join their high school team, encourage them to start a team if they don't have one there, and go from there.
Just start at your high school. Explore competing. Explore making a call out poster. Small stuff like that. Over time, go up to your club leader and say, "Hey, can I get involved with more leadership opportunities? Do you need me to help out with practices? Do you want to throw a tournament within the school or maybe invite another school over? Do you want us to make videos or have streams or social media posts? Can I be involved in that? Could I write an article for the school website or do an interview with the school paper?" Those are all different things that if you start doing that in high school, you're going to be set up for success at the collegiate level.
"This is a space that needs more people who genuinely want to put in the effort. It goes back to the answer I gave to kind of wrap this up: be the person to just do the thing. Start it."
Dahle: That's a great encapsulation of any advice I would give to students looking to continue or start in scholastic esports. Dylan, thank you. We're coming to the close, and you've done a great job of giving an overview of your program and what you're looking for in incoming students, and anyone looking to get into this space. I wanted to give you a quick closing remark if there's anything you'd like to give our audience before I close this out. I'll give you a minute or two if there's anything else you'd like to bestow upon us.
Gentilcore: One of my greatest skills is doing things for nothing. I do not make a lot of money off of all the work I put into things outside of directly related to my job, so if anyone ever needs anything, if you'd like to have a conversation about collegiate esports, if you want to have a conversation about what you can do to better yourself in this space or another one that's adjacent to it, I'm always happy to have conversations. I'm happy to hop on a call, message me through email or Discord. My name is Dylan Gentilcore. You're not going to find another person with that name. So, at the very least, you can just Google me. You'll be able to find my contact information, UWRF Esports. You can reach us through our Linktree. That's just Linktree UWRF Esports. We're UWRF Esports on everything. So, feel free to find me. Start a conversation. If there's anything I can do to help anyone, I always try because I think that's the right thing to do.
This is a space that needs more people who genuinely want to put in the effort. It goes back to the answer I gave to kind of wrap this up: be the person to just do the thing. Start it. And once you start it, or if it's already started, help build it up more. Leave something behind that you're genuinely going to be proud of and that you can say, "I'm really happy I spent my time doing that over these past few years." You'll feel that way because of the people you meet, the experiences you have, and the skills you were able to develop as a result of it.
Dahle: I will make sure that all of your Linktree information and contact information is in the YouTube description. Don't worry about that. I'll make it easy for them. These are extremely valuable words, and I'll reiterate what you said: if anybody ever has questions, comments, concerns, or just looking to talk about esports, I will also always make myself available. I've tried to do that as well. It's not necessarily about the financial gain of promoting this, but it's also being the person that I would have needed at 15 years old to make this possible. I think those are extremely wise words. Dylan, once again, I'd like to thank you for being my first guest here on our Future Friday segment. Thank you for this afternoon, and I will talk to you later.
Gentilcore: Awesome. Appreciate the opportunity and best of luck with the series going forward.
