Photo Credit: Shane Clausing

By Shane Clausing

acac esports

ACAC exploring possibility of making eSports a school sport

Nov 1, 2020 | 4:04 PM

The Alberta Colleges Athletic Conference says that it is exploring the possibility of adding eSports as it’s next school sport.

The ACAC is made up of 17 colleges across Alberta, including Grande Prairie Regional College, and the organization recently partnered with the Alberta eSports Association (AESA) to help associate with seeing if eSports in post secondary sports could become a reality.

“We’ve been talking about it for a number of years in the ACAC about the growth of eSports,” said Mark Kosak, the CEO of the ACAC.

“It’s popular amongst our demographic and I guess you could credit COVID for something good, because it’s somewhat served as a catalyst for us to advance this a little bit further and see what’s the actual interest amongst our students, and is this a sport we should consider offering in the ACAC.”

On October 23, the AESA and ACAC announced that they will be hosting an eSports test event on November 21. Students at all ACAC schools are invited to participate. Students will have the opportunity to participate in a Super Smash Bros tournament on the Nintendo Switch.

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Those who want to participate must have a Nintendo Switch and the tournament will be organized from the student’s home. Students will then have the opportunity to participate in the tournament against students from the ACAC’s 17 schools.

Kosak says that the invitations for the tournament went out to students late last week.

While he doesn’t have any numbers on how many students could participate in the tournament, he did say that on a conference call, 10 of 17 schools in the ACAC had their athletic directors say that they believe there would be interest from students at the school for this event.

The process that eSports is going through right now is the same as any other sport would have to go through if somebody wanted a sport to become a full time ACAC sport.

Kosak tells EverythingGP that while there is still lots of work to do, there is a chance that eSports could be introduced as an ACAC sport relatively soon.

“November 15 is a critical deadline in the ACAC for an institution dropping a sport or adding a sport. What’s going to happen with this particular sport is that November 15 deadline, there will be an application coming from Innovation and Leadership and that committee is going to take the step to add eSports as an official event.

“That doesn’t mean it automatically gets accepted as a new ACAC sport, but it begins the process of evaluating if it’s the right fit for the ACAC.”

“We’ll form a sub committee to study it and go through certain steps in order to produce a report by spring that our conference council reviews and accepts or declines and we move on.”

The report that will go to the ACAC council will feature statistics such as how many people registered and where people are registering from.

Kosak says that the ACAC plans to run more eSports events throughout the winter of 2021. He adds that the main reason they’re focusing on eSports, is so they can help cater to the students.

“We recognize that the athletes are just as serious and go through some of the same processes of development and training that of a traditional sports athlete.

“This is about catering to our students. We are here to serve students and make their experiences as memorable as possible while they’re in post-secondary, so if eSports is the direction we need to go, then we should do it.”