April, the company inked an exclusive deal with the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) allowing PlayVs and the NFHS to collaborate on a nationwide rollout of high school e-sports—the first time in 100 years NFHS has worked with a third party, Parnell says.
The goal of PlayVs is to create a program that allows the nation’s 14.5 million high school students to compete in various e-sports—multiplayer online battle arena, fighting, and sports games—on behalf of their schools. The inaugural season kicks off in October and will initially be available in 15 states, with Michigan likely being one of them.
More than 70 percent of teens already play video games regularly, so Parnell says he sees the students’ migration to e-sports as a natural progression. Almost 200 colleges in North America actively recruit e-sports players and offer some of them scholarships, he notes.
The broader appeal of PlayVs is that it gives kids who don’t normally try out for school sports the opportunity to play on a team regardless of their athletic ability and reap the lifelong rewards associated with participating in team sports. Student players will be allowed to select their own teams regardless of ability, gender, or age with no set limits on how many teams may be formed—no try-outs required, and no team cuts will be made.
Each school year will have two seasons lasting eight weeks each, and students will play their matches on the PlayVs platform, which also includes leaderboards and league and industry news. At the culmination of each season, some championship games will be played in front of a live audience, but the idea is to play mostly virtually to limit travel time and costs.
“PlayVs is uniquely positioned to organize high school e-sports in a clear and constructive way, shepherding more e-sports stars to the main stage,” said Twitch’s Lin in a statement.
Parnell compares PlayVs’s position to the NCAA, the sole governing body for college sports. “Imagine if one company owned all of high school football, if every aspect of the game and all the data were controlled by one company,” he says, illustrating the potential reach of PlayVs.
The company’s goal is to bring the platform to 20,000 high schools so that every state has its own e-sports league. “Because it’s an officially sanctioned high school sport, kids will be able to letter in it,” Parnell adds. “It’s also the first co-ed high school sport, and probably the only risk of injury is carpal tunnel syndrome.”
Schools will pay $16 per month per student player on a subscription basis to participate. Parnell doesn’t know the market value of high school e-sports, as it’s uncharted territory, but he believes it will be lucrative. PlayVs has roughly 20 employees.
“Beyond the revenues we can generate, there’s an impact to owning an audience,” he adds. “We can provide value to them and extract value from them. I think we’ll be a very big company.”
