By Steve Van Kooten
If someone were to imagine a "student athlete," they likely aren't going to think of someone sitting at a computer playing a video game. In fact, some might say that's the opposite of an "athlete."
But that would be a mistake, and Kaden Nehl, a graduate from Clayton Ridge and current student at Northeast Iowa Community College (NICC), knows all about the rigors and demands it takes to compete in eSports.
After graduating from high school, Nehl chose to continue his education at NICC because they offered an affordable degree and had an eSports team. He represents the school in three games: Marvel Rivals, Overwatch and Hearthstone. Earlier this year, Nehl won the National Junior College Athletic Association Esports (NJCAAE) National Championship in Hearthstone. It was the eSports program's second championship.
"Marvel Rivals and Overwatch are hero shooters, where it's a team versus another team with some common objective," he said. "Hearthstone is different from the other two because it's a card game, so that one is about strategy, counting numbers and thinking ahead."
Playing more than one game can be like being in more than one sport; different games require different skillsets. Hero shooters, for example, are spin-offs of traditional shooter games (such as Call of Duty) with players selecting characters that have unique abilities or weapons that other characters do not. The games put more emphasis on team dynamics and player roles in battle.
Nehl, for instance, said he can play a "tank," a player who leads the charge and acts as a damage sponge, or a "damager" who doles out loads of damage to take other teams down, depending on what team members he's playing with, and the skills and training needed for these roles are different.
An eSports athlete has a multitude of skills to master to compete at a high level, including time management, multitasking, spatial reasoning and hand-eye coordination, to name just a few.
But for Nehl, the most important thing he's worked on is communication, and that's a skill he can take with him past his eSports career.
"Communicating with my team about what's going on in a game can translate into communication at a full-time job [where] I have to tell my team about problems we have to solve," he said.
Verrick Foust, instructor and head eSports coach, said the students in his program do many of the same things that athletes in traditional sports do: they watch videos of their performances for critique, come up with strategies and practice every week—they just do it without the kneepads and helmets.
Even though eSports is a growing field within athletics, there still aren't many teams in the local area yet. Despite that, the NICC Cougars are flourishing. When Foust came on in August 2024, he estimated there were 10-12 students involved. Now, that number is closer to 30 athletes competing in 11 different games. It's the second largest athletic sport at NICC today.
"In 2024, the college had just started building up its athletics program, and so we were getting baseball, softball, track, dance and all these other athletics," he said. "It's been a great deal of our students working on that process, with Kaden being a key point along with our other eSports students."
Athletes in the school's eSports program are also held to similar standards as other students. Each participant has to be full- or part-time enrolled in an academic program and demonstrate academic proficiency.
"There's a negative connotation that if you're playing video games, you're not paying attention to your academics. That's not the case here; all of our students in the program have at least a 3.0... I'm a very competitive person, and a lot of our students are competitive, but student success is where our main focus is," said Foust.
And while there are plenty of ways that eSports are similar to conventional sports programs, there are some differences. One of the unique features is the sports schedule. There are two eSports seasons per year: one in the fall and the other in the summer.
"It gives students the ability to compete in different games when they otherwise might not be able to do so," said Foust. "The students are really dedicated; they work hard and practice. They're competing against people in the United States and Canada and winning."
