Jeremiah Leathe spends more than half of his waking hours playing video games. But sometimes, he just wants to take a break. Sometimes, he wants to get dinner with his teammates.
And when they get dinner, decked out in Maryville sweats and shorts, people always ask the same question. What do you do at Maryville? We play esports, they say.
Play esports? You can get a scholarship for that?
Yes, they get scholarships. They get full rides. Twenty-two of them –– to one of the best esports programs in the entire country. In just eight years, Maryville has developed dynasties in the video games League of Legends and Overwatch, winning four national championships and sending seven players professional. Leathe, 21, competes on the school's League of Legends team, where he spends seven days a week playing video games.
High school kids, waiters, family, friends –– they envy Leathe. A full scholarship to play video games? That's amazing. Unbelievable. A dream, a joy, a never-ending rush of happiness and fun.
"I need to tell my kid to play more video games," they joke.
"I wish I could play 12 hours of games a day," others say.
"They don't understand," Leathe says.
Leathe knows that he's getting a college degree, something people go into debt for, by playing video games. "I'm definitely privileged," he says. But people don't understand what it takes to compete at this level –– the countless hours staring at a screen, the wrist pain, the messed-up sleep schedule, the constant stress that if you're not working, someone else is and you'll lose your spot.
"It's not about playing 12 hours a day and just having fun," Leathe says.
It's about lightning-quick reflexes, down-to-the-second strategy, relentless studying and, above anything else, an uncanny drive to push your brain to the max and rack up more than 10,000 hours of practice –– just to be great at something.
This is not messing around on your computer shooting fake characters. Professional contracts are on the line. A St. Louis-based esports arena is in the works. Each player carries the weight of the scholarship dollars invested by the school.
There's just one issue: There is no playbook for collegiate esports. Instead, the entire country is looking to Maryville to create it.
Dan Clerke didn't have some grand plan to become the pioneer of collegiate esports. He just kind of lucked into it years ago, in between Super Smash Bros. games as a sophomore at Missouri University of Science & Technology.
As Clerke struggled with biomechanical engineering, his academic interests waned. He stayed up past midnight, watching League of Legends tournaments and playing more Super Smash. That's when Clerke and his friends spitballed the idea of creating a professional esports team from scratch.
So that's what he did. In 2012, Clerke dropped out of college. He got a job at Dierbergs. He DM'd players around the country and assembled a semi-professional team within the video game Call of Duty. He scraped together money to send players to tournaments on Greyhound buses.
Over time, Clerke's program, Enemy, rose from semi-professional to professional ranks. It expanded into games such as League of Legends, Smite, Gears of War and Counter-Strike.
Then something changed. He watched a young man on his team crumble.
This kid had given everything to professional esports. He had been kicked out of his house and hopped from couch to couch because of esports.
When Clerke's team finally made the professional ranks, the kid bawled his eyes out in relief.
"That was the first time that I'd ever seen stress physically be released from someone's body," Clerke says.
The relief didn't last long. Five months later, Enemy was demoted to a lower division, and the kid was back to sleeping on couches.
Around that time, Clerke had enrolled at Maryville with hopes of completing his degree. President Mark Lombardi learned about Clerke's success in esports and pitched an idea: Would Clerke create an esports program at the collegiate level?
At first, Clerke said no. But then he thought about the sobbing player.
In that moment, Clerke realized that there was no program for someone on the verge of professional levels but not quite there yet. There was no development ground. There was no way to play esports and make a living –– outside of the 50 people who made the professional level.
"[Collegiate esports] is the future," he says. "We need to create a better structure for the path to pro and create a better structure for post-play."
In 2015, Clerke returned to Maryville's president with a deal. Fund some scholarships for his program and he would deliver a national championship.
And with that, Clerke developed one of the first esports collegiate programs in the entire country. The League of Legends team steamrolled the competition, though few schools were participating at the time, going 40-0 and winning a national championship in its first year.
Since then, the number of collegiate esports programs has skyrocketed. Robert Morris University Illinois formed the nation's very first varsity esports program in 2014. By 2020, 451 schools were competing in Riot's League of Legends –– and Esports Foundry, a counseling service, estimates the number of esports varsity programs is even higher. There are nearly $16 million esports scholarships provided to more than 5,000 students every year, according to the National Association of Collegiate Esports.
For colleges, it can help them attract students, create extracurricular programming and, ultimately, develop courses that students want to take. Boise State University, for example, now offers classes dedicated to the esports field.
"It's a cross-disciplinary subject. There's a lot of different specialties within it," says Brett Shelton, who studies educational technology at Boise State University.
He ticks off a number of careers in esports: Event planning, marketing, technology, shoutcasting and data analytics. "I haven't even mentioned player," he says.
For smaller private schools, like Maryville, investing heavily in esports isn't about hopping on the newest fad. It's about money, enrollment and survival. It's their one chance to compete with Michigan or UCLA. The United States has more than 4,000 colleges and universities, and most are fighting for students and their tens of thousands of tuition dollars. Nearly 25 percent of private colleges operate at a deficit, according to Moody's Investors Service — which will only worsen as an enrollment cliff looms due to the declining birthrate.
At Maryville, Clerke says, esports bring in revenue from partnerships (such as Under Armour and McDonald's), as well as attributed revenue from marketing. Some students attend the school because of esports, hoping to make the team.
Look at photos of Maryville online, and it seems like a new campus. It's tucked away off Interstate 64, squeezed between corporate buildings in Town and Country. There are no castle-like study halls or ornate sculptures. Some buildings are a bland tan brick. Others are made almost entirely of glass. One dorm is located in a former hotel. Half the campus is a parking lot.
But walk around the school, and you'll quickly see it is old. Banners honor its 150-year anniversary. Founded in 1872 by the Society of the Sacred Heart, Maryville initially served underprivileged youth and women in south city. Through the years, the school shifted, over and over again — once a junior college, then a four-year school, then a liberal arts college and now a private university, with graduate programs in nursing and business.
In recent years, Maryville made another shift, opting for a technology-centric approach. The school has increased online courses, provided every student with an iPad and added degrees in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and blockchain. Apple has named it a Distinguished School for innovation three times.
"It's hard to [change your school] if you're Penn State," says Barbara Mistick, CEO of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. "It's so big that you can't infuse that across the core curriculum. ... That's someplace where small institutions are uniquely positioned because they can be adaptable and flexible."
The focus on technology has changed the university. Plenty of private schools have seen their enrollment numbers plummet. But not Maryville. From 2008 to 2018, Maryville was the second fastest-growing private institution in the country, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. It hasn't slowed down. In 2017, the school had 2,292 undergraduates. In 2022, enrollment hit 5,711.
All of this growth coincided with something else: an esports team. It didn't just keep Maryville afloat. It put Maryville on the national map.
Leathe sits at his computer, nearby are a Starbucks coffee and an unopened can of Gingerbread Snap'd Mountain Dew. He's tired. He stayed up until 3:30 a.m. playing video games. "The gamer schedule," he calls it. He didn't want to stay up that late, but he kept losing and losing in League of Legends games –– and he wouldn't quit.
"Every single professional and competitive gamer is playing 12 to 14 hours a day," Leathe says. "So if you're not doing that, then you're never going to be better than them."
He fell asleep at 3:30 a.m., but he returned seven hours later, at 10:30 a.m.
When the Maryville esports program first started, players practiced in the computer lab and, later, in a dorm. Now, Clerke's two teams have their own facility. From the outside, it looks like a shed with a garage door. But inside, it is a gamers' treasure chest. There's a common space with couches, chairs, TVs, a Wii console, a kitchen, nearly 20 used water jugs and the outline of a basketball court in front of a mini-hoop. There are two closed-off rooms –– one for the Overwatch team and one for League of Legends –– where each player has a station with two monitors and gamer rolling chairs with the letter M on the back. The rooms don't have any windows, and sometimes, they smell like a hot, stuffy locker room.
Although the summer and fall semesters are more relaxed, the League of Legends team currently competes in college and amateur leagues before Riot's championship tournament, taking place from late April to early May. (Because there is no NCAA, students can win prize money as well.) Now, the teams are playing sunrise to sunset nonstop, seven days a week, with scrimmages, practices, film review and weekend tournaments.
"I don't have a life right now," says assistant director Andrew Smith. "I'm sure most of us don't have a life right now."
In League of Legends, each team has five characters, with the objective of destroying each other's base –– like Capture the Flag. The game offers more than 160 characters, each with their own traits, weapons and special abilities. But before games, opposing teams can ban characters –– forcing everyone to adjust on the fly.
You can't just ransack your enemy's base. It takes around 30 minutes of plowing away through the forestry map, fighting for position, attacking dragons and breaking mini-bases. League is far from an individual game. Each player has a designated position, from "top" to "jungle" to "support," and they all work together to cover the map.
But the rules of League of Legends aren't stagnant like sports. Every few weeks, the game updates –– and the abilities of those players change, called "patching." You get used to one character, and poof, that character loses a special ability.
"Imagine if the NFL suddenly announced next year that rushing touchdowns were worth only five points, or if MLB expanded the strike zone for left-handed pitchers," ESPN reporter Mina Kimes wrote in a 2015 profile of the Lebron James of League of Legends, Faker.
Before games, Maryville spends 20 minutes on strategy. The head coach, TJ LaMarca, who is a current student at the school, compiles a color-coded scouting report on every team, detailing previous games and what characters players like to choose. They'll run over plays and vulnerable parts of the map to attack.
On this Saturday in early March, the team is loose. They're playing against Contingent Esports, an amateur team ranked 32nd in the tournament. Maryville is ranked first –– and they don't expect to lose. Players watch weight-lifting videos and Korean League of Legends streams with crumpled-up dining hall receipts and scrunched-up Monster cans on their desks. Smith reminds some of the players that they must run a half marathon if his hometown Sacramento Kings makes the NBA playoffs. They clown Leathe for his "blue-ass jeans" because no gamers wear jeans. Most sport Maryville-themed sweats and slides. They want to know why in the world he would wear jeans.
"What's your theory?" Leathe asks.
"You need to do laundry," another player says, correctly.
But when the game starts, the mood changes. "All right boys. Let's not underestimate them. They came here to play," one of them says
The room turns into a thunderstorm of clicking, forearms flexing with every click. The players shout in a foreign language, their words jumbled, darting back and forth over headsets.
"Careful at mid."
"They're basing, guys."
"Should we burn at the base?"
"We should burn at the base."
"OK let's burn."
"They have digs though."
"We should send it guys."
"Burn it. Burn it."
Twenty minutes, they're trailing –– 10 kills to 9 kills.
Then Leathe comes alive.
Now that he's playing for real, Leathe's calves hug the edge of his chair, his back perfectly straight and his eyes glued to the screen. Midway through the game, a scrum breaks out near the bottom of the map between all 10 players. It's chaos. People are sending red fireballs, dragons are howling and characters are transforming into a purple forcefield. Leathe is caught right in the middle.
He erupts with a purple circle that hits people like an earthquake. One, two, three, four characters are ganging up on him. You can barely follow what's going on –– there are so many colors and fireballs and people and green beams.
All of a sudden, things don't look good. A flying fireball hits Leathe square in the chest, knocking his health down to 50 percent. And now they're zeroed in on him. One player from the opposing team teleports right on top of him.
But somehow Leathe sees it all. He backtracks from the mess with ease, sliding toward an open area, sending an ice arrow right in the chest of one character, and then another, and then another, and then another, perfectly accurate. He fires so fast, and so efficiently, that the opposing characters barely have a chance to respond. Within seconds, Leathe has wiped out four characters from the other team.
"Maryville University are going to slaughter Contingent Esports!" the announcer yells over the Twitch stream.
Jordan Ousley, the media director, falls back in his chair, unable to believe it.
"Jerry's so good," he whispers.
During the 2022 League of Legends championship tournament, a random school kept winning. Its name was Converse College, a liberal arts school in Spartanburg, South Carolina, with 804 undergraduates.
Ranked as the 22nd seed, Converse knocked off the 11-seed Bethany College. Then the 6-seed Arizona State. Then the 3-seed Michigan State to reach the semifinals.
And there was one player carrying the team, one player who kept the small school competing with the big guns –– a player without a hint of facial hair and short, floppy, messy black hair, who scored absurd stat lines, like 12 kills to 2 deaths. His gamertag was ScaryJerry, but his real name was Jeremiah Leathe.
Everyone knew about Leathe. Clerke admired him from afar, toying with the idea of inviting him to Maryville. Then he heard Leathe's postgame interview.
Usually these interviews are boring. But not with Leathe. He flexed and flaunted and let everyone know that Converse wasn't some random school.
"[Leathe's] like, 'No, we can beat anybody here,'" Clerke remembers. "'That's no problem. It was expected for me. I expect to be here. I expect to win this.'"
"I was like, 'Damn,'" Clerke says, "'this kid does not care. I need that.'"
That same weekend, Clerke invited Leathe to dinner and did something rare: He offered Leathe a full ride and roster position on the spot. Leathe didn't think long before accepting.
"Everyone knew that Maryville was the place to be for League," Leathe says. "And I never imagined I could even make it."
Clerke has seen a shift in the program during Leathe's first year. Leathe arrived two months before school started to practice. He hasn't taken a day off since Christmas. He's extremely serious about his craft, measuring his caffeine down to the milligram so it hits during peak playing hours. Even his breaks are scheduled for 10-minute blocks, where his goofy side comes out and he'll migrate to the mini-hoop court, betting anyone and everyone $2, shooting step-back jumpers and flying through the air to dunk.
He's competitive with everything. The first time they went rock climbing, Leathe cut open his hand in the middle of a climb. But he kept climbing, blood on his hand.
"Jerry has been an instant culture change here," Clerke says. "Our team [has] a lot more energy."
Leathe says he wasn't always this way. "I had a lot of confidence issues."
Leathe was born in Argentina before his family moved to Mexico and settled down in suburban Chicago. After graduating from high school, he worked with his dad in the insurance field for more than a year. He felt bored and aimless.
He started reading self-help books, like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He realized he didn't just want to work a nine-to-five. He wanted to be great at something.
He chose video games.
"I'm gonna try really hard at this game, and if I become successful with it, then that'll prove that I can do anything I set my mind to," he says.
By that point, he had played casually with friends for years. But for a month or two, he grinded. Not just played. Grinded. He studied his moves, rewatched games and stayed up deep into the night. A friend said they were looking for players at Converse College. Leathe didn't know anything about the school –– but he accepted the $2,000 scholarship. At Converse, he reached the top .5 percent of players in the entire world.
The game didn't just provide him with a scholarship. It changed him.
"It gives you a purpose every day," he says. "It gives you a reason to wake up."
He has catapulted up in the rankings. In March, he ranked as the 103rd best player in North America. Now he hovers in the top 30 –– just a few months away from earning a professional contract.
But Leathe's not so sure he wants to go pro. Yes, that's always been the dream, but he doesn't know if he wants to leave Maryville. He likes the collegiate space. These are his friends, the kids he eats pizza and plays basketball with. He can take breaks and go rock climbing. He can get his degree in cybersecurity. College has given him the support he needs, and he doesn't want to lose that coveted spot at Maryville by jumping pro.
Plus, the professional scene is also ruthless. The League of Legends Championship Series, for example, has only 10 teams and five players per team. People live in facilities, where they play video games every moment of every day.
With so few spots, players constantly look over their shoulders in fear of being replaced. This is not basketball, where players can make solid money playing overseas or in the minor leagues. If they don't make the top levels, they're stuck earning just a few hundred dollars a month.
Even for those who hit the big time, the esports field is unstable, with recent investigations revealing that the industry's once-gaudy revenue numbers are over-inflated. "Esports is looking like a bubble ready to pop," wrote Cecilia D'Anastasio of gaming news site Kotaku. Windows for playing careers are tight, too –– most players peak in their early 20s, if not earlier, before their reflexes or wrists give out. After just a few years, almost all are out of the sport.
One of Leathe's teammates, Aiden Tidwell, made the leap to pro after two years at Maryville. Nine months later, he retired and returned to Maryville. It wasn't like he'd dreamed. No class, no mini-hoops — just video games, all the time, with no guarantee of a job next year. "Doing that much of one thing, it's just so much," Tidwell says. "It gets taxing."
Leathe faces similar decisions in the future. But for now, he has a home –– and it's at Maryville.
A few years ago, someone asked Andrew Smith, Maryville's esports assistant director, a question. Who holds the first 30 NCAA football championships?
It's not Alabama. Not Michigan. Not Clemson.
"I don't know," he said.
It's Ivy League schools. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Penn (with the exception of 1870, where no champion was selected). Where are those football teams now? They aren't even in the top level of Division I football –– let alone competing for a national championship.
"And nobody remembers that," Smith says.
The implication is obvious –– how much longer can Maryville survive as the beast of esports?
Some experts will tell you that Maryville is doomed to be squashed by schools with more resources, money and prestige.
"I would say definitely –– 'Maryville, enjoy the success while you've got it. This is not going to last forever,'" says Shelton, the professor at Boise State, with a hint of friendly competition.
Others say Maryville beat them to the punch, and the program will reign for years as slow-moving public institutions lag behind. They'll note that collegiate esports have grown –– and Maryville hasn't lost its footing. Last week, the university's League of Legends team became the first collegiate program to qualify for the Legends Championship Series Challenge League — equivalent to Triple A in professional baseball or the second division behind the Premier League. Their Overwatch team scrimmages against –– and beats –– professional teams. A documentary film crew spent the last year following them around. Players from Arizona, California, Canada and Australia move across the world to play for Maryville.
But really, no one knows what will happen because collegiate esports are just starting. Imagine rewinding to the start of college football, back when they didn't even wear helmets or pads and dressed like they were going to church in turtlenecks and khaki pants. That's where we are in collegiate esports –– at the beginning.
"I'm not even sure if we've hit the crest of the wave yet," Shelton says.
Yet this time, the people starting these programs are fully aware of the potential. They know collegiate sports can be hugely lucrative. They just don't know, yet, how to get esports there.
"The world knows that people are interested in video games and interested in esports," Smith says. "But the world hasn't figured out how you make money off of it. Or how you become the biggest and the best. ... What is the ruling system like? What are the do's and don'ts?"
Almost everyone uses the phrase "wild, wild West" to describe collegiate esports. There are no divisions. Schools are scrambling to create world-class teams and state-of-the-art facilities –– without any sort of roadmap. There are dozens of video game titles for schools to invest in. There is no uniform governing body like the NCAA making sure teams stay in line. Problems abound, from players failing class to a lack of diversity, with most teams overwhelmingly white and male. Just 8 percent of collegiate players nationwide are women. Maryville, for example, has no women on its teams.
At first, Clerke ran Maryville like he ran his professional teams. He recruited players and focused on winning games. They did, but there were hiccups. His first team was disqualified for using an ineligible player. Students struggled to maintain good grades. He juggled managing another professional team, eUnited, while running Maryville.
"I had to learn how to be a college administrator," Clerke says.
The program has evolved. As of 2019, Maryville is Clerke's full-time job. Students have to maintain a 2.5 GPA. Smith, the assistant director, has weekly check-ins with players. They are encouraged to get physical exercise, and they climb as a team three times a week. They also host weekly events for a collegewide gaming club that includes Super Smash Bros. tournaments.
The goal is still to win. But what happens if Maryville stops winning? Does all of this disappear?
The program has been careful about not expanding too quickly. But next year, they will add Valorant and Rocket League teams. They plan to create an all-women Valorant team in the following years.
In recent years, Clerke has shifted his focus outside Maryville to local youth and high school development. He has helped high schools found teams and Missouri create an esports governing system. Most recently, Maryville proposed a 3,000-seat arena in Town and Country dedicated to esports. The arena wouldn't just serve Maryville –– it will be a space for the entire community. He wants to design camps, teams and leagues in St. Louis where kids can improve their skills, manage their time and work as a team in a structured environment –– just like in traditional sports.
"Our industry has done a pretty good job of growing up," Clerke says. "But I've always thought that in order for this to be fiscally sustainable and for this to reach its potential, it needs to grow down. It needs to grow roots. There's no youth ecosystem at all."
Maryville expects to win. But the goal isn't just to become a collegiate esports dynasty. Clerke hopes to turn St. Louis into a hub for esports, where there is no way Maryville or esports can ever disappear.
Hours after the commanding win over Contingent Esport, Maryville loses –– to the lowly 21st seed.
One player instantly rips off his headphones, pushes out his chair and bounds out the door.
"Should we wait to talk about it? Because I'm pretty frustrated," another player asks. Then he too walks out.
The room is quiet. Dead quiet –– outside of the clacking of keyboards and mouses.
After about 10 minutes, a teammate walks over to Leathe. Leathe's eyes haven't left the screen. The teammate doesn't say anything. He just leans over Leathe's chair, puts his hands on Leathe's shoulders and pats them softly.
Leathe doesn't get up. He stares at the game footage, his back arched forward, his hands stroking his chin and his finger over his lips, combing through the clips. Skipping, pausing. Reverse, fast-forward. Trying to find any kernel of what went wrong, if he clicked the wrong special ability, if he went down the wrong lane, anything.
He will analyze and analyze for the next 30 minutes –– until his next game starts, and the process repeats. That is what they do at nationally ranked esports schools like Maryville. At least for now.
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