There are now athletic scholarships for video gamers. This is great news for you. Just look around you. Throughout the years you forgot to groom your child since age 4 to be good at a particular sport. Then your kid never grew up to be tall enough or quick enough or dedicated enough to excel at a particular sport to be considered for a scholarship but when you spent a couple of hundred bucks on a game in a box. Your kid played the games for hours every day till their thumbs were raw. BINGO you have a professional in your house. Go buy the kid more games this gift giving season.

They call it E-Sports. Don’t make fun of the name. We didn’t understand the necessity for e-mail either and now look how important that is. More important than your Post Office at times. I call it the revenge of the nerds finally getting some recognition in the sports world. In Chicago’s Robert Morris’s University they have America’s first scholarship team for Video Games. This time the large basketball players and the beefy football players are in the stands cheering on these much smaller guys with the quick eyes and swollen thumbs. The administration boasts that some of their recruited top players are rated in the .02% of all players in North America.

Yes, e-sports have arrived. Last year the Staples Center normally the home to the Las Angeles Lakers basketball team, was taken over by these nerds for the League of Legends World Championships. It was considered the video gaming super bowl. Inside teams from Korea and China did battle for a Million dollars to the winner. It was the beginning of e-sports. The League is growing rapidly with new members every day. They wanted to create a league to look more like a traditional sport. The on line games draw 4 times more viewers than the NHL. The goal is to make gaming the next official sport in America. Major League Gaming has a Sports Center set to broadcast its games. William Lee is like in any other sport the celebrity player that all followers of gaming know. He is idolized as one of the best players on earth. He looks quite ordinary, not like your traditional buff athlete.

Last summer the federal government started issuing athletic visas to gamers. The same kind of visas used to bring baseball players from the Dominican Republic to America’s pro teams. That makes playing video games a legitimate career path. Someone who is a really good player is making hundreds of thousands of dollars. Websites pay them just to practice. The military is recruiting them to man nuclear cites because they are updating to controller systems. When William logs into a game, more than 7 thousand fans immediately watch and follow him to learn a thing or two about his technique. Now kids will not have to drop out of school to follow this career path. They can get scholarships and degrees in gaming.

Collegiate sports it seems will be attracted to whatever is popular and most of all attracting fans thus money. They arranged $20,000 dollar scholarships to attract gamers and built the first e-sports arena in the country.  Parents are relieved that finally there is an avenue that their kids can take who are hooked on gaming to the point that they can   not do much else. South Korea is the place where the original games were held. This year 42,000 fans came to watch the video game finals.   I give credit to the geniuses who created the games who made them so very interesting and complicated to keep so many people intrigued in them.