The Texas Scholastic Esports Federation works to make gaming for everyone, starting at the school age level.
In the last five years, esports in schools has been actively growing. According to neaToday, the National Federation of State High School Associations recognized esports has an official sport in 2018, and since then, high schools have been steadily adding esports to their classrooms. The Network of Academic and Scholastic Esports Federations (NASEF), one of the organizations that oversees many of the schools not just across the United States, but internationally as well, serves around 30,000 students.
When Danielle Johnson, the Executive Director of the Texas Scholastic Esports Federation (TexSEF), was at the International Society for Technology in Education conference in 2019 in Philadelphia, she said that she had no interest in esports or gaming at the time. At that conference, she met a woman at one of the panels that told Johnson she went to some of the esports panels. Johnson asked what the biggest takeaway was, and the woman replied, “we should start different leagues for girls and boys, so girls don’t get harassed.”
Johnson, a middle school teacher at the time, wasn’t okay with this. She felt that, as teachers, they should be teaching boys how to behave properly and shouldn’t alienate girls just to make sure they’re treated fairly. Toxicity and sexism are a constant problem in gaming, with players facing little to no repercussions for their actions, according to Medium. What Johnson heard in that statement was proof of the work that needed to be done to make gaming a safe place for women.
That evening, Johnson attended a Google event, and at the advisement of friends and colleagues there, applied for the Google Innovator program, which is an accelerator for educators. “It’s tackling a challenge that you see in the education world. I submitted esports as my problem,” Johnson explained. “There’s this toxic community, and if we start these programs in schools, as these kids grow up, will that community change?”
As an educator in the Texas public school system for 15 years, Johnson knew that the answer to this was yes. Johnson took her ideas to the six middle schools in her school district, and it quickly grew into a statewide program. “What started as an emotional response to sexism is now the largest esports organization in the country by several orders of magnitude,” Johnson said. According to the TexSEF website, over 2,000 students participated in the 2022-2023 school year, and that number is expected to rise this year.
One of the ways that TexSEF is making sure that their programs are a safe place for girls who want to be a part of their school teams is to try and bring on at least one female sponsor to the teams. “Having a female in the room lowers the effective filter and kids feel more comfortable,” explained Johnson. “Just having another female in the room makes it safer for female identifying and non-gender conforming students.”
Johnson also says that a lot of schools are working towards having female teams. Hebron High School in Carrollton, Texas formed an all-girls Valorant team this year, thanks to a student who was interested in her school’s program but wanted to have an all-female roster. Jayden Luette, a student who goes by Lunar in game, approached the coach with the idea to start an all-female roster, and he said let’s do it, but she needed to find the girls to fill a team. Luette said that finding the interest at first was a little harder than she expected. “A lot of people don’t talk about playing the games, they’ll be like ‘oh I’ll read a book in the off time,’” said Luette. “But once you find people that play, like our co-captain Lauren, she plays Valorant and is really good, but she didn’t tell me she played Valorant, so I had to persuade her to play.”
Once Luette found the interest, the girls decided that Valorant was the best game for them to play. As of November 1st, the all-girls squad was 4-1 in TexSEF play.
Even though Johnson started TexSEF to show that boys and girls could play games together without the toxicity found online, she says that loves that there’s all-girls teams starting in some schools because of the positivity that they bring. “They’re incredibly positive, love lifting each other up,” said Johnson, “I love that everyone has found their niche and found their people, but I want it all to sound like the bubbly, uplifting, super positive girl’s teams.”
Johnson is confident that, as the kids in the schools get older and they have more access to esports programs, the less strange it will be to have females in the industry, or all female teams. She believes that as more women become the heads of gaming organizations, publishers, and leagues, that they’ll never wonder why a woman is in those positions. “I do think as these kids grow up, we will see more women in esports, but a lot of it is because we’re pushing it in the schools and we’re normalizing it when they’re young, so they’ll never think it’s weird.”
For more information about TexSEF, visit https://www.texsef.org/home.
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