NIU will be the host for all high school Esports championship tournaments which the article quotes "NIU Esports and the IHSEA expect to welcome 700 to 900 high school esports student athletes, 150 teachers and coaches, and the students’ families to campus during the esports season." That is a great win and good student recruiting opportunity for NIU.


https://niutoday.info/2023/10/09/niu-to-...sociation/

Not IHSA football finals, but something

?

Efforts and events like this could go a long way to helping NIU to shift to new and growing career and job trends, like the one described in this FoxNews report (link below).

It describes how more and more corporations are hiring people without four-year college degrees, except in certain fields like Accounting (remember when NIU was ... of course you do), and coding/computer use (Esports anyone?).

https://www.foxnews.com/media/us-compani...hool-costs

Now ... is NIU's esteemed leadership (ahem) can move away from meaningless awards and push that HIT+Nursing project ...

This is great, whatever can get traffic to NIU is a good thing. Lots of tech majors come out from a passion of computer games.

Say what you will, but eSports are huge. It's 9:45 on a Thursday night and there's over 32,000 people watching one team stream Race to World First in the new World of Warcraft raid on Twitch, and it really hasn't even started yet. There's a total of 95k people watching World of Warcraft on Twitch and 115k watching the Thursday Night NFL game. It's a different world than it was just 20 years ago when it comes to sports of all kinds.

Sean T. Fraazier dropped the very important ball on the IHSA football playoffs, that sucked. Glad we backfilled with something, some prestige and new traffic rolling into Dekalb with this.

(11-16-2023 10:47 PM)UnknownScout Wrote:  Say what you will, but eSports are huge. It's 9:45 on a Thursday night and there's over 32,000 people watching one team stream Race to World First in the new World of Warcraft raid on Twitch, and it really hasn't even started yet. There's a total of 95k people watching World of Warcraft on Twitch and 115k watching the Thursday Night NFL game. It's a different world than it was just 20 years ago when it comes to sports of all kinds.

Agree 100%