If you are worried about your child playing hours of video games and you are expecting they won’t go anywhere with it, now may be their chance to earn some scholarship money. With competitive gaming on the rise and technology more present than ever, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that some people would find a way to get some scholarship money. Colleges have started to give scholarships to teens so that they can be a part of their E-Sports team and compete in tournaments.

E-Sports competitive gaming tournaments between teams for certain genres of games. E-Sports tournaments can be extremely small just within the comforts of your home, to a main stage in Dallas or Los Angeles. The big tournaments last a few days with the players staying in hotels and waiting their turn to face off against other teams for multiple hours.

The games that are the most popular and have the biggest prize pools are Call Of Duty, Fortnite, League of Legends and CSGO. The prize pools can range from$100 to $1 million. These competitions have quite a lot of fans depending on the game and the skill of the players. The competitions most always have prizes for the winners. This caused some colleges to gain interest and make teams so that they could be apart of these competitions. E-Sports are just like any other sport, but instead of using athletic ability, competitions are based on gaming skills. They have fans, contracts (if they done professionally) and company partnerships.

These college teams have coaches, practices, film and sometimes exercises that are gaming based, like wrist exercises. These scholarships give teens that sit in their room all night playing video games a chance to become a7 part of a group, make friends, go to college and get out of the house. However, things aren’t as easy as they seem. Teens still have to try out for the teams; and if they are qualified and make it, then, the scholarships arrive. Colleges have handed out over $16 million in scholarships and teens can get up to $19,000 a year depending on how well they perform. Junior Thomas Like said that he doesn’t, “look to play video games under a scholarship in college,” but he does enjoy them.

These scholarships are a great new addition that colleges have started to add in the last couple of years. The E-Sports industry is growing rapidly, and colleges that give merits to skilled gamers give kids that love video games a chance to do something with those hours spent playing them.