E-Sports Coaches

The first official video game competition, Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics, was held at Stanford University on October 19, 1972. The prize: a one-year subscription to Rolling Stone magazine and some beer. The first e-sports leagues—such as the Cyberathlete Professional League and Quakecon—were formed in the late 1990s. In the 2000s, companies such as Xbox and Nintendo began sponsoring online gaming competitions. Twitch, a livestreaming platform that focuses on video games, was launched in 2011. It remains very popular and was averaging more than 1 million daily streamers and over 85,000 live channels as of September 2025. Robert Morris University launched the first collegiate e-sports varsity team in 2014. Today, e-sports have become a multibillion-dollar industry. Annual revenue in the e-sports industry increased from $463 million in 2016 to more than $188.8 billion in 2025, according to Newzoo, a market analytics company.