Athletes were permitted to play remotely from any computer, which meant schools weren’t required to buy any new equipment aside from the games themselves. The league’s startup costs were minimal by design: All that was required of each college was a $1,500 entry fee and the contact information for an adult who was responsible for the team. (LCCC’s entire $84 million annual budget is about what Kansas State University spends on its athletic department alone.) But in the fall of 2019, the National Junior College Athletic Association Esports (NJCAAE) began its inaugural season, involving 12 two-year schools. Meanwhile, some lesser-known schools set out to raise their profiles by turning themselves into esports juggernauts: Missouri’s Maryville University, for example, has become famous for winning three national League of Legends championships and churning out a slew of pros.Įsports were slower to take root at junior colleges, which must be ever mindful of their tight budgets. Big institutions such as UC Irvine and the University of Utah were quick to establish elite programs, funneling millions into building spectator-friendly esports arenas and broadcast centers. In 2014, Illinois’ Robert Morris University had pioneered the practice of offering athletic scholarships to gamers by 2019, esports athletes from nearly 200 colleges and universities were receiving $15 million in scholarships per year. Soon thereafter, the school’s athletic director asked him to chair a committee to investigate starting a similar program at LCCC.Īt that time, esports teams were rapidly becoming commonplace at four-year institutions. Walsh, an ardent gamer who has poured hundreds of hours into Apex Legends, made it clear that he was intrigued. As Walsh fiddled with the troublesome PC, the coach mentioned that a friend of his worked at a Midwestern college that was launching an esports team. One day in the fall of 2018, LCCC’s soccer coach called Walsh for help with a minor computer glitch. That habit would continue once students arrived at LCCC, especially for the small-towners who felt alienated in the relative metropolis of Cheyenne they would often cope with their discomfort, he noticed, by holing up in their dorm rooms and gaming online with friends from home. Because Wyoming’s weather can be so extreme-the long winters, the biting wind-and because there isn’t always much to do, the state’s kids spent a lot of time indoors, jacked into their Xboxes and PlayStations. “And that all starts with getting a good education.”įor years, Walsh had recognized that video games played an outsize role in LCCC social life. “I joke with my students all the time, ‘I want you all to get a nice cushy office job with air-conditioning, or sit in front of a computer for seven hours a day, and then go home to a nice house,’” says Richard Walsh, an instructor in LCCC’s information technology program and an alumnus of the school. For rural kids, an LCCC degree can be an affordable ticket to a less secluded, less physically taxing future. Though many of the school’s 2,800 full-time students are Cheyenne residents, a fair share come from the isolated hamlets that are strewn throughout the massive state-windswept towns of a thousand or so that are dependent on gas drilling or coal mining. The 271-acre campus of LCCC-“L-Triple-C” in local parlance-sits on the city’s southern edge, across from the desolate grasslands that stretch to the Colorado border 8 miles away. The school was looking to hire a coach to lead the program, a one-year contract position that paid $15,000. Athletic scholarships would be provided to gamers who were supremely skilled at the likes of Call of Duty and Super Smash Bros. Laramie County Community College (LCCC), the only institution of higher education in Cheyenne, was starting a varsity esports team. In April 2021, about a year after Landvogt’s death, a friend of Marquer’s called to tell him about an article in The Cheyenne Post.

All the while, a suffocating cloud of depression stopped him from glimpsing any way forward. He paid his bills with temp jobs, stripping insulation from abandoned buildings and helping people navigate the Affordable Care Act. He went through the motions of looking for a job in Dota 2, but with in-person tournaments suspended due to Covid, hiring was at a standstill. He managed to complete his thesis and get his degree, but it all felt hollow. Marquer spent the next two months at his parents’ house in Cheyenne in a haze of grief. An autopsy would reveal that her blood alcohol level was above 0.4, more than five times the legal limit for driving acute and chronic alcoholism were listed as the causes of death. On April 8, 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic’s first wave was battering the US, Marquer got a call from the police in Haltom City, Texas: Landvogt had been found dead in her boyfriend’s trailer.

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