I've always believed that scholastic (and collegiate) esports is an incredibly important part of the esports ecosystem, and that it was always a matter of when, not if, collegiate esports will explode in popularity. And now more than ever, collegiate seems primed to take off.
But as I did more research on the community and started talking to folks it became clear to me that while the community is amazing, vibrant, and passionate, the collegiate scene still lacks infrastructure. Namely a central hub: a place where fans, players, alumni, and leaders could come together and find a sense of community. A place where trending news can easily be discovered and discussed. A place that aggregates collegiate tournaments and matches.
Enter Juked x Collegiate Esports.
We're doing a couple things to create a new center of gravity for the collegiate esports community in our upcoming app that we think could make a positive impact on the Collegiate ecosystem.
- We've created a new category in the app that users can follow (and post about): Collegiate Esports. Think about this similarly to Reddit: once users follow the category, they'll see posts about it in their newsfeed on Juked. Any user can tag @Collegiate Esports in their post, which will make their post visible to all users who follow the category.
- We're inviting Collegiate Esports orgs to send us their team information (submit your team's information here) so that we can add it to our database. Once added, users in our app can then find, follow, and post about them. Similar to the Collegiate Esports category, tagging the esports team will make the post visible to all users who follow said team, and when your team is playing in tournaments we will notify users that matches are going live!
- We're adding Collegiate Esports tournaments to our tournament database/backend (submit your tournament's information here), so that there will be a central/easy to use hub for collegiate esports tournaments and we'll send push notifications when your favorite teams are playing.
Finally, we're also inviting ALL collegiate esports fans to join the Juked alpha (to apply, just fill out this quick form)! We're still in limited alpha testing, but are excited to extend the opportunity to any and all fans that want to try out our new social network for esports. As a side note... we're currently out on iOS only, but Android users should still apply - we'll let you know when the Android beta is ready :)
I won't profess that we have all the answers and solutions to this problem, but I do very much hope we can be a resource and meeting point for collegiate esports. Every single collegiate esports person I've talked to over the past month has been amazingly passionate and supportive, and we're glad to welcome you all to the Juked :)
Ben Goldhaber, Co-Founder & CEO
Officially supported collegiate orgs include...
University of Texas at Dallas
Drury University
Alvernia University
Aquinas College
University of Colorado Boulder
New England Institute of Technology
Converse University
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Hawaii
UNC Charlotte
Ryerson University
UCLA
Stony Brook University
Ashland University
University of Warwick
Cal State Dominguez Hills
Wichita State University
Dalhousie University
University of California, Santa Cruz
UC Santa Cruz
University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
Clarke University
SUNY Polytechnic Institute
Want your team added? Submit your info here: https://jkd.gg/collegiateteams