If you want to expand the player base, expand access.

Back in 2016, I had moved to South Dakota to teach at a school in a small town located within the Standing Rock Reservation. All my students were Native American, and the area struggled with poverty, substance abuse, and suicide. Like many areas with similar problems, students often didn’t see a path forward for themselves. The school has struggled for years to provide education at a level that prepared students for college, and even when students who were prepared graduated, there was a lack of means to send them to college.

I had been playing League of Legends since 2009 and was, and still am, a fan of the game. While I am not a good player, I understand the game well enough to teach the basics and spot mistakes. By 2016 you were starting to have some college teams form, the beginnings of eSports scholarships, and even some tournaments for high school teams where money for college tuition could be won. In short, League of Legends was becoming a path of opportunity.

As soon as I arrived in my new position, I talked to the administration about starting a League of Legends team. I explained the benefits, teamwork, focus, working towards goals. I pointed to the college teams, the scholarships, and the high school tournaments, and how these things were most likely to grow. I also pointed out the game was free and so very little, if any, financial support would be needed. The administration was on board, the team would be able to use the school computer lab for practice.

Next I had to gauge interest. I put up flyers, set an interest meeting date. I had enough students show up to form two teams. Worlds 2016 was starting, and we met up to watch some of the games. Then we ran into a major hurdle. None of the Students have a PC at home. While that in and of itself wouldn’t stop the team from forming and playing (we could still practice at the school), the major problem was getting accounts to the point where they could play ranked. Getting accounts to level 30 with 20 champions to participate in ranked when you can only reasonably play, at most, 10 hours a week is not achievable. Especially when the school is not going to spend money to buy xp boosts and champions; this was also before the rune system change, when we were facing building up stocks of runes for each account. Even if we did manage to do that, we would lose all the work whenever a student graduated from the school.

I wrote Riot about the school, the social systems it existed in, and the challenges involved in getting a team going. We didn’t ask for free things, we didn’t ask for free levels, or boosts, or champions, or runes. We asked for school accounts that would belong to the school team, be leveled up and resourced normally, but be able to be kept by the school and re-used for other students as the old users graduated or otherwise left the team. We received a reply from Riot simply stating simply that they don't offer those types of accounts to the 'general public'.

Thus, the League team never got off the ground. And the experience of my students, in regard to computer access, is not unique. I’ve talked to counterparts in rural South Carolina, Louisiana, Arizona, and in inner-city Chicago and they say their students are in the same situation, they either have no access to a PC, or at least no access to a PC that they can monopolize for hours a day in order to practice League of Legends.

And it is a hard problem to see. According to reports like [this](https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/home-computer-access) one, 80% of children have access to computers at home. Yet no study, that I have seen, addresses this question in terms of eSports level of access. It’s also very misleading, as since 2011 ‘access to a PC at home’ has included mobile devices.

And so, as I watch an LCS game and the casters are talking about the need to expand the player base to improve the regional talent pools, I say expand access. Partner with Libraries and schools in areas where this is an issue. Maybe even open some Korean-influenced gaming centers. And Riot doesn’t need to carry the burden alone, as a philanthropic project, why not partner with other companies and organizations that have an interest in eSports and funding a pipeline of player talent to expand access and provide support? At the very least, do not hamper programs in these areas by preventing school accounts or a similar team building mechanic.