A business-minded look at digital and social media in sports
Watch or listen to episode 296 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which host Neil Horowitz shares learnings from the Gondola Sports Summit ’25, where experts in the social media, content, creative, and production fields in and around sports came together for discussions and conversation.
48-minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and YouTube
WATCH IT:
It’s generally accepted that we’re a bit overstimulated these days. Sure, there’s an insatiable demand for content, but there are endless feeds (literally), trends that come and go in a flash, and headlines that move a mile a minute.
In life, one of my favorite reminders is to step back and take in the view, to stop and smell the roses. Because that’s where the greatest insights lie, when the revelations come — that all those granules of content and headlines we consume every day add up to form bigger pictures.
We’re entering the age of guides (or maybe re-entering). Think about it — we went from following specific individuals and news/cultural commentators to surrendering our attention to all-knowing algorithms to, now, perhaps something in-between. Users will spend hours scrolling through TikTok without putting much weight into the handle behind the content. But those same users will subscribe on Substack or Patreon and form community and zealous parasocial relationships with podcast hosts, YouTubers, and Twitch streamers.
It is into this environment that OffBall emerged, seeing an opportunity to become a trusted brand, a guide, if you will, to connect the tributaries of the rapid flow of stories in which we swim every day. Not a day goes by that there’s not a sports and/or sports-adjacent story trending on Twitter, there’s always chatter chum for the watercooler. Sports has succeeded in pervading seemingly every nook and cranny of culture. Chris Stone and OffBall, the sports media brand he co-founded, want to help fans make sense of it all, to see the forests forming in all the trees.
“It’s a matter of identifying things that 5 million people haven’t already seen and then trying to assign some cultural meaning to what it is,” said Stone in describing OffBall’s mission. “It’s not that this happened. It’s this happened, and this is why this might be interesting to you or why you should know about this. It’s trying to peek around those cultural corners and assign some framing to all of our stories, and that’s something that we spend a lot of time working on and workshopping every day.
“It’s not just saying, Okay, we identified some interesting stories, but what is the broader story here? What is the throughline here? What is the framing here?”
This perspective is well-understood by Stone. For years, he was Editor-in-Chief of Sports Illustrated, whose weekly publication eventually required a more thoughtful approach to sports coverage as the length of the news cycle shrank amidst the rise of social. By the time the magazine hit newsstands, oftentimes several days would have passed after the big title game or the bombshell blockbuster trade or transaction. But dangit if we didn’t still look forward to reading, knowing there’d be that kind of bigger picture thinking, a different angle or deeper meaning explored. Stone explained that similarity between SI and OffBall, further illuminating the role OffBall seeks to serve.
“[It’s] similar to what I did at Sports Illustrated, because even Sports Illustrated was a weekly magazine. While the majority of magazines are monthly, weekly, once upon a time, was a high velocity cadence,” said Stone, “and sometime in the 1990s, especially as ESPN started to hit its peak, a weekly magazine was not such a high velocity product…
“So what SI had to solve for and putting out a weekly magazine was being able to package a series of stories that everybody in some form knew about, but giving it some sort of cultural weight, or assigning it some sort of framing that somebody else hadn’t thought of, taking you to a place that you hadn’t already gone.”
Producing savvy content is just the start. It takes more to stand out these days and earn and retain audience. As Stone described, content and stories come in many forms — long-form stories, short-form videos, podcast clips, Twitter threads, memes, carousels, Q&As and chats, and the list goes on. In some ways, packaging is less relevant than ever. A good story can succeed in countless forms, allowing users to consume however they’d like. But when it comes to attracting an audience that wants to consume your content, presentation is just as important as substance.
“It is an act of curation,” said Stone, who launched OffBall in 2024 alongside his two co-founders. “You’re packaging something. Think of it almost as like a museum exhibit. You’re presenting something that, together individually, is a lot different than what it is when it’s part of a larger whole. You know, it’s a collection of things, and how things mix and match with each other is really important. And I think when we think about the daily news cycle in sports and culture, we spend a lot of time using the word mix; like, what is the best mix of stories, of tone, of voice, of subject, of platform?”
OffBall puts so much thought into the packaging and approach to content and analysis because they’re not just out to entice the algorithms, they want audience. Not a viral clip or post, though they won’t shy away from massive metrics, but users who consume consistently. Fans who know and appreciate OffBall’s content, packaging, and POV. Fostering those intentional relationships is essential to building a lasting brand in 2025.
“Of course, we all want 100 million [subscribers], right? And we don’t want just 100. But the point is pretty clear — you want the right people coming for the right reasons,” said Stone, “and the right people are people who want to engage with who you are and what you’re delivering them, who are very aware of the fact that I am developing a relationship with OffBall, and that is really important.”
Stone continued: “I think in kind of the AI algorithmic kind of infused model, there is like this sprint to the algorithm that doesn’t really matter. It’s about just your place in line, and I’m saying something that’s very basic, and it’s been kind of picked over and parsed plenty of times before, but that’s not especially rewarding. I mean, we all want great scale. We want all great audiences, but we want audiences that actually care about us.”
OffBall is serving a unique audience. They’re not fans of any one specific sport, but they’re interested in how sports mirror culture and vice versa. This author once wrote about how baseball history reflected American history (the roaring ’20s, racial equality, labor relations, etc.). There’s a lot to learn from following the pathways and permutations of the billion-dollar behemoths, but there are often emerging insights peeking out of smaller (by comparison), more emerging and upstart sports and leagues.
There’s a strategy where OffBall could’ve gone after the less-covered sports, seeking to meet underserved fans. Or they could have gone all-in on sports with already-enormous fan bases, where winning over even a fraction could mean massive numbers. For Stone and OffBall, the strategy is yes; yes to all of it, wherever the dots connect and wherever the stories take them, sports big and small.
“OffBall is already distancing itself a little bit from the everyday who won, who lost, who’s great, who’s not, but at the same time it’s not an untapped space, but we would argue it’s an under-tapped space that gives us like a little bit of a white space to like traffic in sports…,” said Stone, noting smaller sports don’t have as many cultural commentators digging deep as the biggest leagues. “The thing about the underserved sports is you often find things in it that are really interesting things that say a lot about broader sports culture. So that’s why there’s a lot more opportunity to go deep there, because so few people have gone deep on it.”
Stone and his co-founders launched OffBall because they envisioned a gap in the market, coupled with a behavior of curation that many fans were already attempting (and largely struggling) to do themselves. It doesn’t mean their approach is the right one, it’s just different, and the bet is that what they’re doing is appealing enough to enough fans. (They’re off to a good start there) What OffBall is doing is different, and that’s the point.
It sometimes feels like every paradigm has been exhausted, and the next disruption isn’t around the corner, perhaps as it once was. But the increased omnipresence of sports in seemingly every part of society, and the interest that sports-driven stories merit, means the opportunity invites innovation. The audience, the angles, and the attention are there; may the best approach, personality, and packaging rise above the fray. As the sports media lifer Stone reflected on the state of sports storytelling, his excitement for new ideas and approaches was palpable, as he described one that caught his eye recently, sports journalism veteran Joon Lee’s YouTube channel and content.
“There’s probably a more eloquent way I could describe all that, but that’s interesting storytelling to me, and that’s the type of storytelling to aspire to,” said Stone. “And it feels very original…
“There are still people out there who have this belief that you can tell stories in new, interesting ways, that kind of value quality and thought, and they can still be interesting, and you can still have a real sense of discovery coming out of them, as opposed to this culture that is, again, what I referred to earlier, where you end up at a site you don’t even know you’re there and you’re there for 14 seconds, and you may never come to that site again. You just wanted the headline, you wanted the click.”
Stone and OffBall want more than a click. They want a relationship, to earn the trust and affection of an audience that opts in to them, knowing they’ll get content, quality, and insight they won’t get elsewhere. In a vast sea of stories and posts, OffBall, they believe, represents an under-tapped offering. Such that, even while we believe that by staring at screens and scrolling feeds for hours a day means we’re better-informed than ever, it’s that unending, rapid-swipe, attention-deficit consumption leaves a big gap in enlightenment. ‘
It may sound highfalutin and overly aspirational to use such a term, but if OffBall nails it just right, they’ll accomplish such lofty goals, giving fans a unique combination of information, entertainment, insight, and illumination. It’s like Ferris Bueller famously said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” OffBall is looking around for us, ensuring we don’t miss it. And in doing so, they may be providing us the right outlet at just the right time.
On episode 295 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted with Chris Stone, Co-Founder, OffBall.
What follows are some snippets from the episode. Click Here to listen to the full episode or check it out and subscribe to the podcast via Apple or listen on Spotify or YouTube.
On episode 293 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted with Arianna Allen, Social Media Coordinator for the Houston Texans.
What follows are some snippets from the episode. Click Here to listen to the full episode or check it out and subscribe to the podcast via Apple or listen on Spotify or YouTube.
Watch episode 295 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Chris Stone, Co-Founder, OffBall.
76 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and YouTube
WATCH IT:
We’re in a golden age of content in the sports world.
Think about all the new categories of content that have sprung up in and around sports in the last decade. It feels normal today, but fans didn’t always get to consume content about athletes’ fashion choices. They didn’t get to learn about what went into landscaping the field’s grass or get an inside look at the planes and hotels that are part of the athlete experience. It’s hard to remember a time before fans knew about players’ tastes in music, food, and pop culture, let alone their takes on the controversies of the day, like whether the dress is blue or a hot dog is a sandwich.
It’s still sports content. But it’s so much more.
The evolution is not limited to subject matter outside of gameplay. Incredible plays and magic moments still generate massive engagement and exposure, but they’re often just the starting point to richer storytelling. Today, moments get magnified. The live broadcast remains paramount (for now), but as sports fans increasingly consume clips and feeds more than live broadcasts, the opportunities that this new golden era of content presents feel limitless.
Russell Simon saw it happen in real-time. He and his colleagues at the National Football League (NFL) realized that fans couldn’t get enough content. The infinite scroll of the social feeds meant the engagement to earn from fans’ insatiable appetittes was limited only by the volume of quality content the leagues and teams could produce from their weekly live events (aka games). Thus was born the live content correspondent program (LCC), which today is a staple of major leagues around the world.
“We had creators in every market shooting mainly video content on a mix of DSLR and phone, primarily in the beginning, and we realized pretty early on that we had accidentally created a new rights category of real-time, social-first content from every game,” said Simon, who today is a partner at Zero Blitz Media, which works with brands, athletes, and creators to produce premium social-first content. “We had the best moments from the minute the first player walks in the door for arrivals until the game ends, and you get a player signing off, speaking directly to the fans 20 seconds after the game ends. It started to very quickly open up a world of possibilities just on game day.”
It wasn’t that the LCC program was capturing solely never-before-seen content. Game broadcasts had evolved across sports, driven by innovations in the 1990s and the influence of NFL Films, to show the players walking in the arena before games (so-called ‘arrivals’), amplifying increasingly ostentatious celebrations, and showcasing unique pregame player routines, among other elements. But where broadcast directors saw quick shots to intersperse or bumpers heading into breaks, Simon and the producers and leaders behind the LCC program saw the potential for something more. The otherwise afterthought shots and sights and sounds could be elevated and, in many of the social feeds today, are the main event, garnering more engagement and reaching more diverse audiences than even the most incredible catches, dunks, or hits ever could.
“I would say it was really about presenting [the content] in more of a social first native experience was really what the LCC program did,” said Simon. “We were able to take a shot, a really cool entrance shot of Patrick Mahomes or a really well-dressed player, and we were able to take that literally seven second moment from just something that flashes across the pregame show to a really elevated moment that can live across social, across the player channels, across this whole distribution network.”
The program continued to get even better because the LCCs (live content correspondents) stationed at each game brought their own ideas and vision to the content. (One of those talented LCCs, David Kushner, is Simon’s partner at Zero Blitz Media today.) They got the basics down pretty quickly, ensuring they were in place to capture all the big plays. But give creatives time and agency, and let them also bring their own flair to the production process. Simon and his team saw these LCCs evolve the content over time. And, before long, the program had not just the trust of the league and its teams, but also the interest in this unique cache of content.
“You can teach people how to shoot a football game, you know, where to stand, the best spots to be to maximize your chances of getting the best moments,” Simon explained. “I would say that the LCC program became a place where your skills and experience and the work that you had put in to get to that point put you in a place to shine and grow in terms of being able to capture the best moments as they happen very quickly became just table stakes where everyone is going to be very solid and have sort of this the level that we would expect. And then it was how you go beyond that and that, you know, all of our creators were able to sort of make their own in a different way…”
Simon continued: “On Sunday, we were there with them for 15 hours managing all of our creators, making sure that we captured everything we needed to capture, beyond just the moments, if there were special sponsor asks, special player asks, you know, really being cognizant of how we could be helpful to this ecosystem that we built out. And that’s really what made it effective. People trusted us…”
The value produced from the LCC program was magnified exponentially when that NFL ecosystem was activated. When one thinks of ‘social-first’ content, it conjures ideas of content in the social feeds, naturally. But this content isn’t just for followers of the team and league accounts. It’s not even just for the social networks. That’s just the start. When you take that content and throw gas in the distribution engine, the ceiling for reach, engagement, and value grows higher. When you take that content and utilize it as ingredients for more substantial stories, the radius of the content’s effects spreads wider and deeper.
“So Justin Jefferson scores a touchdown and does The Griddy [to celebrate a score], and then he’s got that video from an LCC ready to post right when he gets to the locker room,” said Simon about the dance that the Minnesota Vikings wide receiver made popular among NFL players. “It was Hey NFL fantasy, when people draft Patrick Mahomes, can they see all of the content that we’ve captured from him during a game and get that alert to be like, Oh wow, he just did something cool, let’s put it on fantasy. It was, Hey, [to] our college partners, Justin Jefferson’s got a big following at LSU, LSU, Here you go. Take this footage and make it something that will reach your audience. People are creating GIFs and sending GIFs in their text chat with their friends. Let’s take this Griddy dance that Justin Jefferson just did that we just shot and put it on Giphy. Hey, let’s tell a story about the dance on the NFL’s TikTok channel. Let’s bring in an influencer to do the Griddy with Justin Jefferson and make a viral moment out of that. Let’s, of course, give that footage to ESPN, NBC.
“The program worked because we were able to take one moment or something that happened in a game and make it so much more by building out our, I’ll call it the creator ecosystem.”
Stick some compelling, social-first content into the flywheel and that’s how you develop new fans while also giving existing fans more avenues to engage and content. That insight drove Simon and his NFL colleagues to dive in deeper (and guides him at Zero Blitz Media today). And the upside of producing content in AND around the fringes of sport, combined with the interest-driven algorithms of social and creator distribution engines, and you have the recipe to reach more messaes than ever.
Simon elaborated: “There’s definitely an element of any good strategy right now in terms of how you reach and grow beyond your core fans,” he said. “I think a lot of that, frankly, is stuff that is not just the highlight, but talking to the doctor, talking to the equipment manager. We worked on a show when I was at the league on the [business development] side, ‘Most Interesting Jobs’. That’s a show that my fiancé will sit down and watch, and think is really interesting, and they’re barely showing a highlight at all. Like, the stories around the game, there’s only going to be more opportunity in there.”
Early in Simon’s career, he worked on Snapchat’s live stories. Fans on the ground at live events (Simons focused on sports) submitted content to Snapchat and Simon and his colleagues took those submissions (sometimes supplemented by Snapchat producers onsite at events) and curated them, sometimes adding in graphical and post-production elements, for users to enjoy on the Snapchat app. These were decidedly social-first and mobile-first videos, clearly captured by fans using their phones, giving the content a cinéma vérité feel. Users tapping through live stories felt like they were there. It was cool.
It didn’t take long for ‘Stories’ (even if not ‘live’) to become a new content format across platforms. (Snapchat’s CEO Evan Spiegel jokingly calls himself ‘Meta’s VP of Product for a reason.) But there’s a next level to social-first content now, to not rest on the engagement it captures in real-time, but to build on it. Content is currency as much as it ever was, and in this golden era of content, organizations — and potential sponsors — appreciate the value of quality content. The ROI picture is developed, we’ve arrived. As Simon and his partner build Zero Blitz Media, they know that when good content is the north star, everything else follows from there.
“If you make really engaging content, good things will happen; if you make good stuff, good things will happen,” he said. “It may take some time, but even when there’s a brand integration in it, we’re focusing on making quality work, and the monetization is going to follow. Obviously it’s a balance, but we see brand dollars and ad dollars flowing towards our world for a reason, and it’s because people are spending their time there, and good things are going to stand out.”
On episode 293 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted with Russell Simon, partner at Zero Blitz Media.
What follows are some snippets from the episode. Click Here to listen to the full episode or check it out and subscribe to the podcast via Apple or listen on Spotify or YouTube.
Listen to episode 293 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Russell Simon, partner at Zero Blitz Media.
87 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and YouTube
WATCH IT:
There aren’t many casual esports fans. There are loads of casual video game fans, but esports fans are avid, fanatical, and extremely engaged.
That oversimplified reality is both a challenge and an opportunity for the present and future of esports.
Esports haven’t had time yet to build generational fandom (even though fandom spans age ranges). It’s not as easy to attract find ‘casual’ fans who may flip through a broadcast network on a weekend, get exposed at a sports bar, or see some incredible highlights on ESPN or other sports media. And esports isn’t like other ‘sports’ — that’s obvious, but not in the way you think; it’s like trying to bucket all stick-and-ball sports into a single catch-all category. ‘Esports’ spans tons of ‘titles.’ The collection of popular esports titles like League of Legends, CS:GO, Valorant, Fortnite might as well be basketball, football, baseball, soccer, etc. And yet far more people have played a video game than have played in a football game. Some of the most popular global individual figures are gamers. Some of the biggest live events in the world are esports events.
So what’s stopping esports from emerging from the burst bubble of esports in recent years and what caused the so-called ‘esports winter’ in the first place?
Brendan Hall has a unique lens into esports. Prior to trading in grass fields for massive monitors, Hall covered ‘traditional’ sports for years, covering Super Bowls and Stanley Cups before making his way into esports. He witnessed the rise — as investment money poured in and teams were being sold for millions — and the subsequent regression. He watched as leaders trie to copy and paste the prevailing paradigms from stick-and-ball sports into the esports world. And it didn’t work. But every esports event he attends is a reminder to Hall of the high ceiling for esports, if they can nail the right business models.
“Live events are freaking special. It’s where the casual fan becomes the loyalist,” said Hall, who worked Oxygen Esports, part of the Kraft Entertainment Group, parent owner of the New England Patriots, among other entities, before he became Esports Coordinator at Endicott College. “But [live events] are also expensive to put on. And I don’t think the model should be totally predicated on selling a bunch of sponsorships either. So I think it’s hard to make money.
“I think, for whatever reason, you sometimes see, orgs leaning too early into the merch thing, like, Oh, let’s be 100 Thieves and we’ll do random drops around Southern California. We’ll do these FOMO events, when you show up and when they’re gone, they’re gone. [100 Thieves] has been working two decades on building that…It takes a long time to build that kind of community. The one thing that this industry could use more of probably is patience with seeing things out.”
Hall noted the discord between investors anticipating massive returns and the need for esports organizations and teams to build up community over time. As he made his way into esports, he took the community-building to heart, understanding that loyal fans can’t be taken for granted. Esports fandom IS still developing and IS a relatively new part of culture, so creating that sense of community and belonging and feeling part of something bigger is paramount, Hall explained.
“Every month or so, we’d have watch parties, free to attend, just show up,” said Hall, recalling his days with teams like the Boston Breach, “and any fan that showed up, I would just give him my cell phone number and say, ‘Hey, text me anytime.’ And sometimes they’d text me at 1:00 in the morning [about] roster movement. ‘Why did you drop this guy? What’d you think?’ ‘Oh, I’ll ask Murph when I get in in the morning, but I don’t know.’ I think they thought it was so cool that a director-level guy was willing to open the book for them and be transparent with them, and let them feel like they have a seat at the table, let them feel like this was their home.
“I think the reality is you have to be willing to meet your community where they are, and for me that includes face to face, text me anytime, you might piss off my wife, but so be it. Because it makes them feel like they have a place where they can be themselves and they have a place where they really actually have an outcome in a thing.”
The star player nature of sports has been part of esports virtually since the start. While more stable rosters and hereditary, geography-based fandom has led many traditional sports fans to ‘root for laundry,’ as comedian Jerry Seinfeld famously put it, esports fandom has always been player-centered. Such fandom can be iether a feature or a bug, depending on perspective. It means fans from all over the world will watch and attend events to catch a glimpse of their favorite players in action, regardless of which team they’re on. But it also means trying to recreate the franchise models in other sports is a bit more challenging.
But Hall sees such fandom and sees opportunity. Traditional sports see player-driven fandom more than ever now, whether it’s Messi bringing millions of fans to Inter Miami CF or LeBron taking his legion of fans from Cleveland to Miami to LA. The vital next step is to capitalize on the influx of fans, capturing them with content and storytelling that enhance affinity and avidity at all levels.
“At Boston Breach, like the amount of fans we had from all over the country, not just Boston, so to say we’re Boston’s team, well, this guy’s a fan of the Breach because they signed a certain player,” said Hall. “With the Uprising, we had fans in Omaha, Nebraska, because of players that we signed that they had followed when they played Overwatch. That’s also difficult to understand. That’s why I’m not so bullish on the franchise scene.”
He continued: “When I would ask people at our watch parties like, ‘Dude, you could watch this from your home on Twitch, why’d you drive three hours from Maine to come to Foxborough?’ And [they’d] say, ‘Well, yeah, but you guys have Methodz (Anthony Zinni) here and I like watching him play Call of Duty on Twitch.’ That’s a real thing. So the more you can establish relationships with those fans who might not meet you in person, through content, through the storytelling, that’s going to go a long ways.”
It’s those relationships and that community of esports fans that can transform the millions of video game-playing individuals into esports enthusiasts and fans. That’s part of the calculus at play, and the opportunity Hall sees for esports to reach the heights once envisioned. Playing video games is such a universal pasttime and the esports community is so welcoming and open, so it doesn’t require squinting to see the possibilities on the horizon.
“I’ve worked in the NFL. I’ve worked in sports media. I’ve worked in tech. I’ve never met a community like esports that’s been as inclusive and open-sourced. It’s incredible”, said Hall, who in addition to running Endicott’s esports programs also teaches courses in marketing and esports. “So I just think if you believe in that community, you’re going to thrive in the long term because the numbers are pointing away. My friend Chris Postell, esports founder, does a lot of really good research on the college scene. 90%, or close to it, of students entering college are gamers, whether they want to admit it out loud or not. 77% of of millennial parents play with their kids at least once a week. I play Super Smash Bros with my daughters every night, and it’s it’s awesome. This stuff is not going away.
“But one of the other problems I see, go back to the basketball logic. No one owns basketball, right? Somebody owns Fortnite, and they can change the rules, pull the plug, whatever, whenever they want, and that’s terrifying for a lot of third parties trying to work within the esports ecosystem.”
Several different ‘sports,’ or gaming titles, came up throughout the conversation with Hall, so the latter point about who owns and runs these games, is a particularly salient part of the picture. Esports organizations often compete in several titles, but that’s not exactly how fandom works. A diehard Rocket League fan may not care to watch Call of Duty, a CS:GO fan may not give two rips about League of Legends.
Hall faces this conundrum head-on in building the esports program at Endicott. The biggest esports organizations face such choices, too. The way Hall sees it for the esports world at-large, they’re best off cultivating superfans around a title or two than trying to reach and claw for the attention of casual fans in hopes they’ll convert. The desire to grow the overall number, even at the expense of avidity, is admirable, sure, but it’s not the path to sustainability for the industry.
“I love this concept that Kevin Kelly, the great entrepreneur, wrote years ago about 1000 true fans,” explained Hall. “One of his all-time most read blog posts is about this idea that if you have 1000 fans that spend $100 a year on your work, that’s six figures in your pocket. So it’s more worth it to focus in on those loyalists because they’re going to end up spending more money with you over the long run.
“So, similar concept, right? Again, you talk about micro communities. I think you’re better off really focusing on a couple titles, and that’s where they have a lot of success.”
The avid players, the loyalists — that’s the goal. But you do have to start somewhere, of course. The underlying opportunity for esports is that casual fans already exist in spades. The path from casual gamer to esports fan isn’t linear, but the participation and organic exposure to the titles within esports cultivate a natural potential interest. If part of the magic of traditional sports is that any kid can grow up envisioning themselves hitting the game-winning home run or knocking down the buzzer-beater shot, that same sense of accessibility can last well past grade school for esports.
Hall reflected on those natural pathways, offering his real-life experience building up Endicott’s program — through coffee shop encounters.
“Where the Overwatch Championship Series, I think, has a chance, it feels more holistic, like it’s going to feel like almost a Premier League relegation-promotion kind of system, like, anybody can kind of come from the top,” said Hall, alluding to the meritocratic nature of pure esports. “That’s a system that feels like you can get behind, it comes from a place of more common sense, more aligned with how esports fans behave.”
Hall went on, describing the organic but opportunistic growth of his teams at Endicott: “All the Starbucks kids are on our Fortnite team now, because they were working at the Starbucks [near Endicott’s esports lab]. I’d come by every day, get a coffee, they’d come down here to their lunch break and they’re playing on the PCs between classes, and one of them, Sam, just got a Victory Royale last night for the first time all season. Six months ago, I was just bumping into him every day, buying a coffee from him at Starbucks.
“So the casuals, as they enjoy this place more, they’re going to want to learn how they can take the next step.”
Esports doesn’t need to mimic traditional sports to succeed, it needs to embrace what makes it different. The passion is already there. The player-first fandom, the global accessibility, the embedded community culture — all of it is fertile ground for something lasting.
It won’t happen overnight. Esports isn’t built to amass a cadre of casuals. The future of esports won’t be decided by flashy moments or headline deals, it’ll be built fan by fan, event by event, and through rich storytelling and deep connections. Video gaming isn’t going anywhere, so the potential for esports remains as bright as ever.
On episode 292 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted with Brendan Hall, Esports Coordinator for Endicott College.
What follows are some snippets from the episode. Click Here to listen to the full episode or check it out and subscribe to the podcast via Apple or listen on Spotify or YouTube.