Patrick Doolin, Fred Wiersig, Grant Whitt, Christian Martin
Drew Yarbrough
Four University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) students will present their esports production company, Gaming Oasis, and its various ambitions in the Boeing New Business Challenge.
Fred Wiersig, Patrick Doolin, Christian Martin and Grant Whitt are the four UAH students representing Gaming Oasis in the Boeing New Business Challenge. The group is currently managing the first season of its new competitive gaming league, the Southeastern Esports League (SEL), in which collegiate esports teams face each other through video game based competitions to earn scholarship money. Some of the colleges participating in this inaugural season include the University of Oklahoma, Florida State University, the University of Alabama, Auburn University, UAH and more.
Gaming Oasis aims to make Huntsville the “capital of esports for the southeast,” and the creation of the SEL was an immense step towards that ambition. Through its current season of the SEL, Gaming Oasis is working on a very specific goal: establish a concrete league and clientele. Speaking about this, Wiersig said, “we wanna build such a good community with the colleges that we no longer need to reach out to them every season … we want it to be something that they are so excited to play in every year, and if anything, make it their main priority.” Much of the work Gaming Oasis has done to make the SEL an appealing league involves its production value. The SEL livestreams have several impressive elements like graphics that communicate with the game, the playing field painted with the competing schools’ colors, names of players are visible, and experienced casters provide commentary.
As Gaming Oasis continues to manage the SEL, it is also working toward a particular long-term goal: build a proper esports ecosystem in the southeast. To achieve this, the ideal scenario is to incorporate a high school league into the SEL alongside the already-established collegiate category. Then, colleges will be able to recruit players they see perform. Additionally, scholarship prizes are anticipated to increase in the future. “Right now it’s only in the thousands … we’d like to really expand that into the tens of thousands,” Wiersig said. Yet another aspect Gaming Oasis wants to include in the SEL is amateur gaming; it wants to provide people interested in semi-professional esports an opportunity to become part of the gaming ecosystem.
The four members of Gaming Oasis participating in the Boeing New Business Business Challenge collaborate primarily on internal elements like finances, organizational planning and legal work. Wiersig has experience working with clientele, Whitt is a finance major and thus contributes to financial outlooks, and Doolin and Martin are information system majors who offer valuable insights on how to best operate. Wiersig commented about his team, “it’s pretty invaluable to have both sides of the spectrum of people who are able to look at the business side and people who are able to look at the text side …”
Originally, the students’ idea was to build a family entertainment center equipped with gaming computers and virtual reality games, but before they could truly begin work on this the COVID-19 pandemic began and they quickly discarded the idea because it would no longer be feasible. The students then turned their focus to esports and used the pandemic years to develop and solidify their plans, ultimately leading to the creation of the SEL. Although the entertainment center will not be pursued, there are plans for a similar building: a Gaming Oasis esports facility. “Our eventual goal is to implant a facility here in Huntsville, about a 3.5 million dollar facility where we can compete in esports and make this happen,” Wiersig said. Because the SEL is currently hosting online tournaments, its next step is to host in-person tournaments, and a facility solely for this would be ideal. The expectation for the facility is to be multi-purpose so that it can host esports tournaments, but also other gaming-related events.
As the students prepare for the final round of the Boeing New Business Challenge, they have continued to be productive with their project based on the feedback they received from judges and their assigned mentor. In the qualifying round they were asked many questions about the facility they plan to build, so they intend to discuss this more extensively in the final round. Also, Gaming Oasis is now considering a plan for incorporating influencers that represent its brand. Regarding this, Wiersig said, “[Our mentor] brought that up and we honestly never thought it was the best idea. We thought it was going a little too far out and the more we thought about it, it was like, ‘actually yeah, this would be smart.’“
When asked about how Gaming Oasis would use scholarship money from the competition if it won, Wiersig mentioned in-person tournaments. He explained that in-person tournaments are incredibly appealing to colleges, and thus the plan would be to host an in-person tournament that offers scholarship prizes and covers competing teams’ expenses. Wiersig further elaborated, “with that money, we’d 100% use it to bring people to Huntsville, compete in Huntsville, and let the colleges know that esports is changing in the southeast, let them know that this is the next step. They are gonna compete in person, in an environment where there’s a crowd cheering them on with their student body, making sure that they feel like true college athletes.” Gaming Oasis’ trajectory is far from over, and next is its participation in the final round of the Boeing New Business Challenge.
The Boeing New Business Challenge is a competition hosted by the UAH College of Business and sponsored by Boeing. Undergraduate and graduate students were invited to pitch business ideas for the opportunity to win up to $15,000 in scholarships. The competition consists of two rounds, the qualifying and final round. The final round requires teams to conduct a verbal presentation and submit a written business plan. The final round will occur on March 4, 2022.
