How Small, Rural and Charter Schools Are Winning at Esports

Challenge No. 1: Casting a Wide Net

Briggs says it can be challenging to make esports available to a wide range of players. “I grew up as an athlete. I also loved gaming,” he says. “Now there’s a future in it — you can get a scholarship to go play a video game — and so it makes sense to include everybody.”

To that end, the school’s program, which was established about four years ago, runs along several tracks. A varsity team competes at the state level, and students also play competitively through Oklahoma At Home (OATH) Esports. In addition, “we also have our Epic Game Club — that’s the fun side of it,” Briggs says.

The school partners with gaming platform LeagueSpot to manage the game club. “They do a great job of helping us reach as many kids as we can,” he says. And that outside partnership also helps to strengthen other aspects of the esports program: “It gives me and my coaches more time to focus on the varsity team.”

Challenge No. 2: Facilitating Team Play

At Rural Virtual Academy, an online school in Wisconsin, kids sometimes use Nintendo and MSI devices to participate in hosted esports events at a remote learning center, but many also compete from home. Middle school teacher Jesse MacDonald needed a way to make home play a collaborative team experience. His solution is to run everything on Zoom.

“We have five coaches, and they log in to a Zoom room. We set them into breakout rooms by team or grade level,” MacDonald says. “If they want to show the gameplay so that everybody can see it, they can broadcast it right in there.”

This approach helps to create a cohesive team experience for far-flung participants. MacDonald says that Zoom allows those at home to communicate with teammates and coaches. “It also allows us to broadcast our games for spectators,” he says.

In games likes Super Smash Bros., spectators in the game space can cause play to lag. The Zoom broadcasts help ensure players can connect in real time, without spectators’ bandwidth use slowing the game play. “You don’t want to put too many people in a Smash arena,” MacDonald says. “This allows the whole team to watch.”

Challenge No. 3: Building Participation

At Onekama Consolidated Schools in Michigan, now in the first year of ramping up an esports club, gaming equipment has been readily available. “We’ve been using Nintendo Switches. We were able to borrow a couple of those from the local ISD for this first year, and we’re looking at purchasing our own,” says Technology Director Alex Wolkow. But the program faces a challenge around building participation.

“Being a K–12 school of under 300, most of our students already have their sports, teams and groups established. That’s good, but it can be hard to pull the basketball player off the court for esports,” he says.

To address the challenge, Wolkow acts in close coordination with other school staffers. “We work with the coaches of the other sports to work around the schedules. We try to actually schedule esports around the other sports’ time periods, so the students can be available to do both sports,” he says.

Wolkow also took a strategic approach to the location of the esports activities, to help build interest. “We do it in the media center, which has glass walls out into the hallway. As the kids are doing esports, the rest of the kids that are leaving see that there is something going on,” he says.

That strategic location is helping to move the needle on participation. The current players “are big into video games, and our hope is that with their classmates seeing them and hearing how much fun they’re having, that the word of mouth will help more students to get involved,” Wolkow says.

Challenge No. 4: Ensuring Equity

New York City-based Summit Academy Charter School has had an esports program for a little over three years. It includes both a club and an elective class, and esports teacher Andrew Gonzalez wants to ensure equity among his players. That can be tricky.

“The challenge is mainly accessibility. Not every student has access to the equipment at home, so it requires an effort by the school to make items like gaming consoles and laptops readily available for everyone,” he says.

RELATED: How schools can support girls in esports.

To get the program off the ground and ensure everyone who wanted to participate could do so, the school initially partnered with The Center for Educational Innovation (an organization that promotes esports in schools) and the Brooklyn Nets (to supply handheld devices and gaming chairs).

As esports gained traction, the school administration stepped up with additional support. “Summit funded and designed a dedicated gaming room for the program, equipped with a plethora of consoles and monitors — one of the first in the city of New York,” Gonzalez says.

“We have a number of Xboxes and Nintendo Switches. We also have laptops, because while the children do play games, we use these games as the driving force to teach English literacy and other topics. The laptops are primarily used for doing research and projects,” he says.

Challenge No. 5: Keeping Equipment Current

Success in esports depends not just on the players’ skills but also on the equipment. Players need devices with sufficient processing power to ensure competitiveness.

That was an issue at East Rockingham High School, a rural public school in Elkton, Va. that launched its esports program in January 2025. “When we started, we were using hand-me-down equipment that was eight to 12 years old, and it definitely was a challenge, especially when we played games like Rocket League,” says esports coach Eric Rauschenberg.

“We had constant crashes, and a lot of lag when playing the actual game. In a competitive atmosphere, that doesn’t bode well,” he says. “Rocket League is cars playing soccer, and when you have a team coming at you and they go to shoot on goal and you get lag — by the time it comes back, sometimes the ball is in the goal.”

A $5,000 matching grant from the Joe and Debbie Showker Foundation has helped the school build up the program. “We never did find anybody to match it, but the foundation went ahead and gave it to us anyway,” Rauschenberg says. The foundation first helped pay for new gaming furniture, and then for the replacement of 12 computers. “We purchased MSI computers because I know they are some of the biggest in competitive esports. We wanted to get something that was recognized and that I knew would hold up to esports.”

DISCOVER: See how your school can level up its Esports program.

How Small, Rural and Charter Schools Can Get Started With Esports

For schools looking to launch an esports program, experts say it makes sense to assess the specific needs to effectively guide technology investing. “Don’t think about technology first. Think about your goals, your outcomes,” says Gerald Solomon, founder and executive director of the Network of Academic and Scholastic Esports Federations, or NASEF.

Schools need to ask what they want to achieve as far as student impact, whether it’s attendance or engagement or STEM learning — whatever it may be. And then, engage the students and the players, and find out who they are and what they want to do,” he says.

“You might find that they want to play mobile games. Or they may be really interested in streaming, shoutcasting, production,” Solomon says. “You’ve got to understand that before you start spending money.”