Mike Dahle: Welcome back to another Future Friday episode. Here with us today is Ian Sheeley from the Waukesha County Technical College. Ian, thank you for joining us this morning.
Ian Sheeley: Thank you for having me.
Dahle: All right, Ian, give us a little bit of your background here as to how you ended up at WCTC, and what led you into esports as a profession.
Sheeley: Awesome. I'd love to. So my name is Ian Sheeley. I currently serve as the esports coordinator at Waukesha County Technical College. My journey into esports started after I graduated. I went to college at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. Afterwards, I worked locally in Brookfield, Wisconsin, coaching youth esports and working with local parks and rec departments to create competitions and tournaments here in Wisconsin.
Afterwards, I took a position within the collegiate esports sphere at Manchester University in North Manchester, Indiana. At Manchester University, they competed at the highest level and it was an excellent experience to see how a collegiate esports program operates at that level. Super cool stuff, and then I really wanted to come home to Wisconsin, so I found the perfect opportunity here to join the team at WCTC and I haven't looked back since, and I've grown the program from the ground up and am just so happy to be home.
"We spent about a million dollars on our esports lab and facilities, including our broadcast booth."
Dahle: Can you give us a little bit of an insight as to what is offered at WCTC regarding esports, which titles you're in, what leagues you may compete in and stuff like that?
Sheeley: Awesome. Yeah. We compete across multiple different titles, including Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Overwatch 2, Valorant, Rocket League, and League of Legends. We compete primarily in national collegiate leagues, including PlayVS, and local Wisconsin leagues [like] the Wisconsin Esports Conference. Our practices usually run three to four times a week. We balance a lot of different coaching techniques such as VOD review, strategy sessions, scrimmages with other universities. Each individual esports has a dedicated student coach to help develop and coach the players.
Dahle: With WCTC being a two-year college, [are there] a little bit different expectations? Do you have part-time and full-time students on your rosters, or do they have to be full-time?
Sheeley: All of my students are full-time, but with our curriculum, we really stress hands-on work experience, so many students will balance an internship as well as competition, as well as classes and wear a lot of different hats. I feel that it brings about a different maturity level to students at WCTC having this work experience and going to work each day and coming to school afterwards. It really helps mature our players and teach them how to operate in a work environment.
Dahle: I think that's great, and as a former youth apprenticeship coordinator, I appreciate the hands-on learning that our students are getting there. That kind of leads me into another question then. Beyond gaming, do you have any other tertiary type hands-on roles within your program for broadcasting, event management, and stuff like that?
Sheeley: Absolutely. That is specifically something that WCTC highly reinforces is that kind of hands-on work experience. We have a wide variety of involvement beyond the gameplay. Students can work in our broadcast production: our live streams, our stream assets, and any promotional materials for our live streams for our games.
They also operate as event managers, so we have events for community members, events for students. I'm just going to plug our bimonthly Super Smash Bros. tournament called Owls Octagon. We're on our 25th iteration of the tournament, and it brings in some of the best players in the state of Wisconsin to the WCTC esports lab so that everybody can come and compete and have a great time. I do $50 giveaways and there's really a great turnout and a great community that we've built here in Waukesha.
There's also coaching, as I said, for our student workers, there are coaching opportunities, analytics opportunities. I do want them to get involved with a lot of the names in esports, so there's always networking opportunities for them, and any opportunity for them to help the Wisconsin Esports Conference, I make sure that they're very well connected, whether it's shout casting, producing the streams, producing graphic design elements for the Wisconsin Esports Conference, I make sure that my students are well-networked.
Dahle: That's awesome. Those are really good experiences for students to get. I think that's one of my favorite things about esports is just how much we can rely on using it as a career-based learning experience for those kids—or I should say students at your level. You're working with a different population, but when you start to look at recruitment or getting more students into your program, can you talk about what your expectation is for incoming freshmen and how you assist with that transition from high school to college?
"We have a wide variety of involvement beyond the gameplay. Students can work in our broadcast production... They also operate as event managers."
Sheeley: Absolutely. I would say that the number one thing for an incoming freshman, a prospect esports athlete, is accountability. I stress accountability from day one. It's important to have that balance of academics, of practice, of all the other things that are going on in your life as a new college student. Finding the right balance and keeping yourself accountable to not let your team down in any aspect, whether it be academics, not practicing, not scrimmaging enough, and just being accountable not only to yourself as a student, but to your team members as well.
Accountability towards the program, towards me, and just making sure that we're meeting those eligibility requirements for these leagues and making sure our GPA and credit loads stay at a healthy level and get people out the door in a proper amount of time and making sure that we're making steady progress towards our degree. There's a lot of accountability that I personally take on, but it's the students themselves that need to keep themselves accountable.
So I look for students that are mature, that are going to realize the expectations that are being held to them and really excel when given those responsibilities.
Dahle: Do you have many supports in place to help ensure that they maintain, I assume, at least a 2.0 GPA? Do you have a check-in process with them or drop-in study hours or anything of that nature with your program?
Sheeley: Yeah, we have a lot of structured support systems for our students. First and foremost, we are on a term system. Right now on the week of October 15th, we just hit the end of our first term, so students actually have just completed their first course. We go on an eight-week basis and after the first term, grades were actually submitted yesterday, so I'm able to check and make sure that my students are keeping their grades up and they're eligible for the next term. It's on a term-by-term basis where I'm constantly about halfway through the semester checking in on them, making sure everything's okay. We also have structured support systems such as study hours, tutoring access, and mental health resources available to all of our athletes. I also personally train our coaches to monitor their players to make sure that their wellness and academic progress is going smoothly.
Dahle: I like to hear that. That's good information. I have a general question because I actually don't know and I live relatively close to campus. Do you offer on-site housing?
Sheeley: No, we do not. We do not offer dorms.
Dahle: I know it's starting to be a growing thing with some of our two-year colleges around the state, and I wasn't sure if WCTC had that. So, I guess that's conversations for the future.
Sheeley: I mean, [laughter] they love this program, and if there are students that want to live on campus, we're going to do whatever we can to accommodate them.
"We were just ranked 30th in the country in Rocket League. We have a chance to compete at DreamHack Atlanta."
Dahle: Okay. That transitions us into the facilities questions here then. Can you talk about what your arena, your lab, what that looks like? What PC specs are we talking over there, Ian?
Sheeley: Absolutely. We have Alienware Aurora R15s. Those are 4070s, 32 gigs of RAM. We have 244 hertz monitors, and all of our equipment is supplied by Alienware. We try to go for the biggest and best, so we spent about a million dollars on our esports lab and facilities, including our broadcast booth. We have plenty of toys in the broadcast booth for students interested in broadcast and production to play with, so we're using real-life applications to help our students succeed. These TriCasters and production equipment are used by the NFL, local news stations, so we're really giving our students some hands-on experience with some great tools to help them in the future.
Dahle: Speaking of the future, with you being a two-year program, can you also talk about some of the majors that your players are looking to go into, and what career paths they are looking to explore through the use of your esports program?
Sheeley: Awesome. I actually have a pretty unique experience with this question. WCTC is a pretty fragmented campus. There are few times where you'll actually need to come in person to our central hub, which is the C and B Building. A lot of the time students are going to be spending time in their own individual buildings such as the criminal justice building, the graphics building, and so on and so forth across campus, and so you would just drive to your building, go in, and then leave without interacting with the central hub that is the Pewaukee main campus.
A cool experience for myself was that when we opened our esports lab and started competing, the students on these teams would be from all over campus and they probably wouldn't have interacted if not for esports at WCTC, so it was amazing to see an automotive student sitting next to a cosmetology student, sitting next to an IT student, sitting next to a marketing student, so it's a very fragmented campus, but esports acts as the glue to bring everybody together.
Dahle: That's really sweet.
Sheeley: Yeah.
Dahle: With WCTC being a newer program, do you have any success stories that you've had come from the esports program just yet, or are you still working on that?
Sheeley: We're going up on our third year now, and I actually think we're one of the more established programs. There are a lot of new collegiate esports teams joining with each semester, and to be around for three years is actually quite an achievement, so I think that we have built a ton of success stories. I think about my Valorant captain last semester who transferred successfully to UWM and is now the captain of their Valorant team.
I think about our graphic design students that have gotten involved with the program and really fostered a healthy resume and booklet of great designs that they've put together for us, for the WEC, for a lot of different things that they were introduced to within the esports space.
I think competition-wise, our biggest claim to fame is our two Wisconsin Esports Conference state titles that we won last Fall. We were just ranked 30th in the country in Rocket League. We have a chance to compete at DreamHack Atlanta at the end of the month here, so we'll be competing in front of 60,000 people in person attendance, as well as over 200,000 online viewers on Twitch, so we're really excited about that to bring WCTC to national attention.
Dahle: Number one, I'm very jealous that you get to go to DreamHack. That's been…
Sheeley: For free.
Dahle: Oh, that's even better! That's even more jealousy coming from me.
That's a really awesome experience, not just for your program, but for those students to get to go and compete in that type of environment. There's not very many that get to say, "Yeah, I competed in front of nearly 300,000 eyes at some point." So that's a really cool opportunity, Ian.
Sheeley: Absolutely. We're so grateful to everybody at DreamHack who put this on and gave us the opportunity to participate in their collegiate invitational.
"Esports acts as the glue to bring everybody together. [It was amazing to see] an automotive student sitting next to a cosmetology student, sitting next to an IT student, sitting next to a marketing student."
Dahle: As we're wrapping up a little bit here, I'm going to give you the opportunity to say, are there any words of advice or recommendation that you would give to just anybody who's looking to potentially pursue playing at the collegiate level or getting involved at the collegiate level?
Sheeley: I would say, if there are any barriers that are in place or mental blocks that are preventing you from pursuing post-secondary education, whether it be financial, mental, whatever is barring you from participating in something great like collegiate esports, I would say that I'm here personally to work with students one-on-one, whether it be offering scholarships or any kind of academic support that I can do within my position to connect them with the right people around campus or to another school or to anybody looking to get involved in esports in post-secondary education, I would absolutely love the opportunity to communicate one-on-one. My Discord DMs are always open for students that are interested in esports, not just necessarily in WCTC, but in the entire state of Wisconsin. I really just want to grow esports in the state of Wisconsin.
Dahle: I very much appreciate your passion for this. It's very nice that you come across as very student-centered and that it's more about their experience and their opportunities, and that's a good sign of healthy leadership in collegiate esports, K12 esports as well.
Ian, I want to thank you for your time today. I greatly appreciate it. If anybody's looking to get in contact with Ian, just look down below in the description to this YouTube video and you'll be able to find his Discord, his email, and any other great links that he wants to share out.
If you want to share any links so that we can watch some DreamHack competition too, when you get there, Ian.
Sheeley: Absolutely.
Dahle: I'll make sure that this video is out in time for that competition, so, once again, Ian, thank you again for your time today. I appreciate it, and my audience appreciates your insight, so thank you very much.
Sheeley: Thank you.
