Mike Dahle: All right, welcome back to another episode of Future Fridays. With me today is our first alumni, Jesse Brawders. He attended Jefferson High School, so we're very happy to have him on and to hear from his experience. Jesse, thank you for joining us today. How are you?
Jesse Brawders: I'm good. No, thank you for having me. This is awesome.
Dahle: I'm going to go ahead and take you back. I know you just graduated college recently here, so I wanted to focus on your experience in high school esports. Can you give our audience a little bit of a background as to what your high school esports career looked like? How many years did you play? Which games were you most competitive in? Any other types of extracurriculars or activities that you participated in?
Brawders: Yeah. I only played my senior year because my friend JR and my brother, Jacob, we actually founded Jefferson's high school team back during my junior year, so by the time we got everything set up, fall season was starting in my senior year. That was the fall of 2019. I only played the one year, and I believe I coached more than I actually played.
I was a cross country runner during that fall as well, so it ended up being most practices were during cross country practice. I'd actually help set up the games, set up scrims, do a lot of the backend work, and then come in, usually halfway through a game, to see how everything was going, whether it be helping out with Smash Bros. or Overwatch, [which] was the big game for me when I was in high school.
I just played the one year. We finished, I believe it was top four at State. We still joke about it, a few of my friends and I, about the state tournament, how awesome it was back then. Just to go through it, be in that in-person environment, even though we lost to, I think we lost to your school, Mike, I think we lost to Elkhorn in the semi-finals.
It was great just that one year. Even though it was kind of short and sweet, it was a great experience.
"I believe I coached more than I actually played."
Dahle: I do remember that. It was before I taught at Elkhorn, so I'm just going to put that on record, but I do remember that was my first thing to seeing even just the emotion from the Jefferson team losing in the finals there and just the the actual feelings and emotions that the players showed that it was like, "Wow, this is actually really impactful. These students really wanted the win, and it meant a lot to them to get that far.”
I imagine some of the process of getting the program up and running and some of those barriers and the work that you had to go into to get started probably played into a little bit of those emotions.
Brawders: Oh, definitely. The whole team was seniors, so it was for all of us, “Hey, we get one shot at this. We're going to do it”. I think it was a 3 - 2, I believe, so we went all the way to the end. Yeah, I think it was just a culmination of everything, but no, it was great looking back on it. I rewatched a little bit of it the other day and it was crazy looking back, but no, still overall just fantastic.
Dahle: With you all being seniors then, you played the one year of high school esports and then you were already starting to look at college probably right around the same time. Because you only had a year under your belt, did you have esports as a role as far as your decision-making process for postsecondary, or was it just one of those things if it's there, it's there? Can you talk us through what your postsecondary selection process looked like?
Brawders: Yeah, I would say compared to most I committed pretty early. I believe I got admitted and said I was going to Arizona State, I'd say probably October of my senior year. So at that point when everything was getting going in esports, I was already leaning that way. For me, it was more as soon as you got admitted and you were accepted and signed everything with ASU, there was a club there, ASU Esports, and they would just let you join the Discord as an incoming student.
For me obviously it was a little different. It wasn't as much a part of the process but it helped the transition a little bit because by the time I got there I already knew some of the players. I knew how the club worked because it wasn't a varsity program, but I at least understood how the club operated and how I could get involved. I didn't know the world was going to force that hand a little bit more, but no, it was just an added bonus that ASU had such a great esports club already there.
Dahle: Let's go ahead and we can talk the transition program, and now you like you said before we started recording, you have a unique transition because you're one of the COVID years, but can you talk about that transition during the COVID process as well, and how did you leverage that to be part of the club too?
Brawders: Yeah. I was the class of 2020, so the COVID class. It was all funky. We never really had a graduation, at least initially. It was all sorts of weird. Thank goodness that is done. For me it was awkward because I never had an orientation day at ASU because all of that got cancelled before, so my only real experience going into ASU was the people that I knew from ASU Esports talking on Discord every day and playing PUGs (pick-up games) and just playing custom games with everybody because at that point I was going to try out for the Overwatch team. I knew I wasn't going to be on the top team, but hey, I can maybe be on JV. We'll see how it goes.
By the time I got to ASU, we had a few online events for ASU esports, and it helped me definitely break out of the shell a little bit because we couldn't really go out and do anything. I knew most of the people in college, at least that first year, just from ASU Esports and they were very accommodating to all of us and they got us all involved right away. I was a sub on ASUJV, turned manager by, I think, about a few weeks in, ended up being more on the managerial side than anything else for ASUJV, and then that's also when I started casting the PAC12 schools, I guess, of old, where I was trying to do a set of show matches during that fall to fill the gap of not really having any of the normal sports going on and the announcement went out in ASU and I always wanted to get into it. I was a sports journalism major, so it was somewhat adjacent to what I was trying to do already, so, I'm like, “hey, you know, why not? I watch Overwatch League and I watch RLCS a bunch. We'll throw something together.” Somehow got in as a color caster for Overwatch. From there, that springboarded the more career side of it for me, for sure, all that broadcasting opportunity and then got involved from there on.
Dahle: You were already majoring in a journalism and so that was your pathway. How did you go about starting to get involved with some of that process? You just jumped to casting, you took your game knowledge and helped transition, but when you're looking for some of those opportunities, were there people that you connected with or different mediums that you used to find those opportunities?
Brawders: Yeah, I was very blessed. I had a lot of great people in the PACU that really helped me out as soon as we got done, because we had a bunch of directors, Utah's director was a big part of it at one point, there was a broadcast producer who had worked with a bunch of different leagues up to that point, so they sent me the Discord link to Broadcast.gg, which is a giant broadcasting Discord server, that has a bunch of freelance opportunities and workshops and stuff like that.
I was kind of just scouring that page for a while. As soon as PACU got done, I'm like, "Hey, I want to keep doing this. Like, this is super fun. I get to talk about video games over a mic. Why not?" At that point, I got involved, I believe, shortly after PACU got done, I saw some volunteer opportunities with a youth league called XP League. I believe there's maybe a location still in Madison, I'm not quite sure, but it was basically the little league of esports was how they modeled their business.
I worked for a random location in Tennessee, so that kept me kind of involved with the youth side of it, and I also got coaching experience down the line with them. Then the other event that kind of springboarded everything, Jesse, who is one of my fantastic friends, now in Dallas, Boston University was running a tournament and that's how I got involved in collegiate and from there he shared with me a whole bunch of production servers that were more collegiate based. And that's kind of where I really started going down from that point.
Dahle: Were some of these larger productions then also asking for a portfolio reel of your casting?
Brawders: Yeah, they would ask for, usually, a reel and then sometimes they would also ask for a brief resume. The resume usually was just, “hey, what events have you worked?” It was more of a list than anything else.
"People want to have soft skills. They want to know you can talk with people, work with people, learn on the fly, and adjust. I definitely leveraged it."
I have a reel. I got my first reel, I think, it was probably about the year mark. Early on, if you don't have a reel, it's okay. I would always just say pick whatever your best VOD is, whatever the best game you worked in was, and pick a five minute clip. That was what I was taught early if you don't have a reel, because that at least allows anybody who's trying to hire you, and this could even be like outside of esports, real world, let them get to know who you are and your best qualities but also be like, “hey this is obviously just one game. I want to keep improving and would love to do that with you,” and that was kind of the way I approached a lot of it and started slowly gaining trust with different collegiate leagues and just started making my connections from there.
Dahle: We'll come back to your collegiate experience, but you did talk about real world application. Can you tell the audience what you've been doing now and how has your background in esports broadcasting, did you leverage that experience to get to where you are?
Brawders: Oh, definitely. I leveraged that, and I was also the eventual vice president of ASU esports and president for a few years my junior and senior year. So I had a lot of official experience with, whether it be looking over people, having people work under me, just a lot of those soft skills that a lot of people look for. It doesn't matter what industry you're in. People want to have soft skills. They want to know you can talk with people, work with people, learn on the fly, and adjust. I definitely leveraged it.
I graduated with my bachelors in May of 2024 and eventually landed where I am now in Green Bay as a news producer that fall. And a big part of my application and interview process was I can multitask because in esports you, whether it be you're playing and you're trying to obviously hear teammates, you're trying to communicate while also trying to play the game, it's a lot of multitasking or whether you're coaching or commentating, managing, whatever it is, you have to multitask. That was a big thing that I put up.
And then again, those communication skills you have, in esports, it's almost a given. You have to have a certain aspect and level of communication, and that was another big thing that I promoted during my interview was being able to get along with anybody and being able to communicate in high stress situations because for me I work in news. Things change in a flash. Now that I've covered two elections, a lot of things can change in a moment, and you have to be ready for it. That was a big thing that I leveraged especially during my interview.
Dahle: That's awesome. That's a really cool skill set that you were able to develop using a club opportunity. To go back a little bit to collegiate there too, looking at your academic load, was there a lot of overlap between what you were doing in the classroom to then what you were applying to the esports program there as well?
"Learning how to talk on camera, I really found my confidence in the esports world. I didn't really have that initially in my classes, so it definitely goes both ways."
Brawders: I would say there were different levels for it, but definitely my sophomore and junior years it was a lot of more of the gen eds and my getting to become a better writer, but that helped me with the esports stuff because I was able to be better as a social media manager for our club and write more well-worded announcements and get everything out to our members in a nicer fashion.
Then also the sports journalism classes that I had I could easily transition over to what I was doing, whether it be the prep sheet that I still use to this day, I got it from one of my traditional sports broadcasting classes that they use for baseball and hockey and football. I used that base template, and I just made an esports version of it using the heroes they play and certain teams they've been on, and you can tweak it.
So there's a lot of things. It's not always going to be a perfect one for one translation of, “oh, I learned this specific skill in school, and I can use it for esports,” but sometimes you can loosely change it over and adapt it into your own way because we all learn differently too. I'm definitely more of a visual person. Everything I have is colorcoded but not everyone is going to be that, but I definitely used a lot of what I was using in school to help with everything I was doing in esports. Sometimes it was the other way around. Learning how to talk on camera, I really found my confidence in the esports world. I didn't really have that initially in my classes, so it definitely goes both ways.
Dahle: Now that you've gone through this whole experience here, what would you say some of the advice for any student that's looking to either get involved within postsecondary esports, and I'll ask that because not only were you president of your club, you were a player in your club and now you've leveraged that as well, I think, for career advancement? Can you give some insight as to what you would say to either high school juniors or seniors that are starting to explore that postsecondary pathway, and what would you tell them about getting involved?
Brawders: I would still prioritize whatever you want to do outside of esports. I would look for that first because pretty much any school you're looking at right now is either going to have some sort of esports club on campus. They're going to have maybe a varsity program on their campus. We've seen a few more of them popping up, at least in the Midwest over the past few years. Prioritize that, but always lean into that. Even in your application, “I want to join the esports club. I want to be involved on campus,” because officials in admissions love knowing that you're going to do more than just sit and do your classes. They want to know you're getting involved. Whether it be with student organizations or official organizations under the school, they want to know that you're getting involved, so always keep that open.
Use those connections. Be like, "Hey, maybe is this something you can feel out?" Usually a lot of directors are very open to talk to, and if you have certain questions about, “hey, how does this school operate? What are some of the positives and negatives?” a director may honestly give you more honest feedback than an admissions person on what they think the positives and negatives are to their campus and that can help you get a better idea of what you want to do post high school because everyone's going to be different, but obviously you can flex that a little bit of looking at, “hey, I can reach out to this person directly. They're going to be completely honest with me.”
If you do join there, then you already have an in and you already have a community that you can join, and it's not like you're jumping into this big unknown that college can sometimes be at the very beginning.
"I would just say bet on yourself. Know your strengths and be open to criticism because, especially if you go into esports... you need to be open to criticism."
Dahle: I think those are some really good points, especially when it is a big transition. I will echo too that if you're staying in the state of Wisconsin, it doesn't have to be a four-year program. Almost every two-year school, I think, in the state has an esports club or competitive team as well, so it's not just limited to four-year universities. Make sure that you're doing some of your research, too. Well, Jesse, that's all I had for today. I do appreciate it. I'll give you a second here if there are any other closing remarks or wisdom that you'd like to bestow upon us.
Brawders: The one bit of advice that I'll give because, funnily enough, that youth league that I used to work for years and years ago, I just left about a year ago, and most of those kids that I worked with back then are now graduating, either graduated last year or are seniors this year, so I've actually had this conversation with a bunch of them on what they want to do.
I would just say bet on yourself. Know your strengths and be open to criticism because, especially if you go into esports, whether it be again a club, a varsity, a two-year, four-year, it doesn't matter, you need to be open to criticism. Usually it's just because everyone around you, whether it be a professor or a TA or your club director, coach, whatever, they just want you to be the best version of you possible, so make sure you're open to criticism,
And even use your high school coaches as a reference if you want to use them as a letter of recommendation going to your schools, especially if you want to do esports. College coaches will take a look at that and they will contact your high school coach and they'll get what you're great at and what you can maybe improve in under their program whether it be the classes or the esports itself. So those would be probably the big three things that I would say.
Dahle: I think that's great advice.Jesse, thank you again for joining us today. It's been a treat. I hope to keep in contact with you here in the future, so thank you again.
Brawders: Oh, thank you.
