Video gaming has become an official high school sport in Utah.

“What we are doing here today in Utah is going to become a national model and show every other state how to do it,” Bob Sorenson of iTEAM USA, one of the groups behind the initiative, said.

State Sen. Daniel Thatcher helped organise the effort, spearheaded by iTEAM USA and PlayVS, to give students a chance at what is quickly becoming a cutting edge sport.

“It will open up more opportunities for our students. What I want the kids to know is there is a career in this,” Joel Marquez, a computer science education specialist with the Utah Department of Education, said.

“Students are the winners. Esports is the gate to I.T. [information technology] and C.S. [computer science]. It gives students a connection and a different view of tech,” Sorenson said.

Organisers believe it will help prepare students to join the workforce in many ways.

“There is a stigma with gamers. An anti-social stigma. I’ve seen 250 students come together of all different genres and become friends and have fun doing this. That created a place of belonging for them,” Marquez said.

EPICENTER Major 2019 series became the winner of Best Experience Marketing Awards 2020, the professional award in marketing and integrated communications for events. The organizer, Epic Esports Events (a member of ESforce Holding), took the first places in both nominations “Best sports event” and “Best hybrid event” (an event where offline is combined with digital). The tournament also won silver in the nomination “Best video game industry event”.

Evgeny Kalganov, Event Director, Epic Esports Events:

“It is great to see our efforts approved by the leading experts of Russia. EPICENTER Major 2019 exceeded even our expectations! Huge thanks to our team for their hard work and immense dedication. It is a challenge to beat the bar you set yourself, but we will achieve even greater results with the next events of the EPICENTER series.”

The expert jury of bema! award has evaluated 420 projects in three macro-categories: B2B, B2C, and B2I. 150 best projects have advanced to the finals after collecting the maximum amount of points in their respective categories. Ultimately, the expert jury has chosen the three best projects in every nomination.

The full list of award winners is available on the bema! official website.

Epic Esports Events specializes in hosting international competitions and is the organizer of the EPICENTER tournament series in Dota 2 and CS:GO in Moscow and Saint Petersburg throughout 2016-2019. The award-winning EPICENTER series gathers tens of millions of viewers all over the globe, its quality appraised by prestigious awards such as EUBEA, Eventex, MarSpo, BISPO, and Sport Leaders Awards.