Esports Awards 2022: Esports Collegiate Program of the Year

The UH program’s esports programme is continuing its meteoric rise by being named the best collegiate esports programme of the year at the recent Esports Awards in Las Vegas. Few people were more shocked by the victory than Sky Kauweloa, the program’s founder, who works for the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The UH program’s esports programme is continuing its meteoric rise by being named the best collegiate esports programme of the year at the recent Esports Awards in Las Vegas.

The recognition was the most recent step in UH and the state’s momentum in the $1.3 billion global esports market, which is rapidly expanding. “It resembles the Grammys or the Oscars (for esports). It really shocks me “to have triumphed,” said Kauweloa, the program’s director since its comparatively recent 2018 start. The nine other top collegiate teams from the United States and England who were nominated included older, larger institutions that run with millions of dollars more in resources, therefore the announcement surprised many people.

Esports—organized, competitive multiplayer video gaming, including collegiate and professional levels—have become more popular with the development of the internet, even though video games have been around since the 1970s and 1980s. When Kauweloa, 44, started planning what he thought would be a modest club with a few students in 2018, he was a graduate assistant.

Leaders at UH and throughout the state routinely laud the recent UH graduate with a doctorate in communication and information sciences, director of the UH Manoa Esports Task Force, and junior specialist on the tenure track for being the driving force behind the esports program’s explosive growth. This year, Kauweloa was one of the top 10 finalists for Esports Collegiate Ambassador of the Year.

In the country, he calculates that there are more than 400 esports programmes. UH Manoa was included as one of the top 10 finalists in the collegiate programme category of the Esports Awards for the second year in a row. The winner of this year’s competition was determined using a weighted voting formula, with a judging panel of business professionals making up 75% of the decision and the general esports community making up 25%.

According to the Esports Awards website, the Esports Collegiate Program of the Year award “honours a group or programme that has significantly contributed to the field of collegiate esports.” Participation in collegiate esports through the planning of events, broadcasts, or other means, a significant impact on collegiate esports through strong play, new initiatives, or higher standards, and an effort to expand collegiate or grassroots esports in novel ways are among the criteria for judging.

Although the award did not come with monetary compensation or any other kind of compensation, Kauweloa said it is “vindication that the way that I have been steering the programme over the past several years has reaped advantages for our students.” It also promotes awareness of the UH programme.

Competition “is not the light of this programme,” according to Kauweloa, despite the fact that every esports programme aims to produce successful players and teams. He thinks the UH Manoa programme won the college prize because it placed a strong emphasis on education and pioneered new ways to introduce students to business executives.

For instance, Kauweloa and other faculty esports supporters saw an opportunity to advance the education of UH students when the well-known video game company Activation Blizzard requested to rent facilities and equipment at UH to hold its Overwatch League professional competition events in 2021, he said.

The Overwatch League visited the campus five times for tournaments, and Kauweloa remarked, “We transformed this rental discussion into a 20-person internship for students so that the students could shadow the Overwatch League.” “It’s comparable to the NFL going to Hawaii and telling the locals, “Get some kids, we’re going to run the Super Bowl, and we want you guys to help us.” That level of capability is unheard of.”

UH hosted the league’s regular season tournaments, playoffs, and championship games for the first time in 2021. Once more hosting an Overwatch League competition this year was UH Manoa. The Valorant team at UH Manoa, which has consistently ranked among the top four in the country this year, won its first collegiate title last year as well as its first international title in August. This year, the UH Manoa League of Legends team finished in second place in the Mountain West division, and the team’s social media profile was ranked among the top 10 collegiate programmes.

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