Esports, Belonging, and the Environmental Probability of Friendship

When I started building our esports program, the objective was relatively straightforward: give students a place to compete in video games as a legitimate school activity and take that competition seriously.

We still do that. We practice. We compete. We care about winning.

But the first year of esports was remarkably different from what the program looks like today. The room was quiet—sometimes painfully quiet. Students came because they wanted to play games, but many did not seem to know what to do with one another. They sat at separate computers, rarely spoke, avoided eye contact, played their games, and went home. It felt less like a team than a collection of individuals who happened to share a room.

Over time, I started opening that room more.

It became available every lunch. Students could come during homeroom. After school, the room stayed open every day, often until 5:30 p.m. Students came to practice, play games, watch matches, work on computers, argue about strategy, or simply spend time around other students who liked the same things they did.

I also started carrying small printed invitations. When I found a student regularly sitting alone at lunch, I could hand them a card that functioned as a pass into the room. There was no need to ask whether they could join the group or somehow negotiate their way into an established social circle. They had an invitation and a reason to walk through the door.

Eventually, those little paper passes became important enough to the students that members of the program began 3D printing permanent versions themselves. They use them to come to the room during homeroom, lunch, and after school.

A few days ago, school security walked into the room and asked us to keep the noise down. The students were laughing loudly enough that we were disrupting nearby school spaces.

I could not help thinking about that first year.

The room that had once been defined by silence, awkwardness, and students who struggled to even look at one another had become so socially alive that we were being told to quiet down.

That transformation has changed the way I think about scholastic esports.

The Environmental Probability of Friendship

I have come to describe what we created as increasing the environmental probability of friendship.

I am not presenting that phrase as an established psychological construct. It is a way of describing an environmental design problem.

Friendship cannot be assigned. A teacher cannot manufacture a durable relationship between two students. What an educator can change is the probability that those relationships have an opportunity to develop.

Esports is remarkably well suited to doing that.

Students enter the room already possessing a common interest. They return to the same physical space repeatedly. Games provide a shared vocabulary before students know anything else about one another. Competition creates common objectives. Teams create roles and interdependence. Wins, losses, mistakes, strategies, rivalries, and ridiculous moments become shared experiences.

The socially anxious student does not have to begin an interaction with, “Tell me something about yourself.”

They can begin with, “Who do you main?”

The game carries the first part of the conversation.

Given enough proximity, familiarity develops. Students begin talking about the game, then about school, then about everything else. Teammates become acquaintances. Acquaintances become friends. Eventually those relationships no longer require the game, the team, or the teacher who originally put them in the same room.

That is when esports becomes something larger than competitive gaming.

Esports Reaches Students Schools Are Not Otherwise Reaching

This may be the most important argument for treating scholastic esports as a serious part of school culture.

Traditional athletics, theater, band, choir, robotics, student government, and other extracurricular programs have long provided adolescents with structured communities. Students gain teammates, repeated interaction, shared identity, adult mentorship, rituals, responsibility, and a place where their absence is noticed.

Schools correctly recognize those programs as important.

The emerging evidence suggests that esports may provide access to that same institutional experience for a substantial population of students who are not participating anywhere else.

Cho et al. (2019), studying one of the first regional high-school esports leagues in Orange County, California, reported that educators repeatedly described esports as enfranchising students who ordinarily did not participate in traditional athletics or other extracurricular activities. Students were not merely playing games; participation connected previously uninvolved students to the broader identity and culture of their schools.

More recent district data are striking. According to reporting by Langreo (2024), 70% of esports participants surveyed in Grapevine-Colleyville had not previously participated in another school activity. The corresponding numbers were 55% in Albuquerque and 60% in Moreno Valley. These are local district surveys rather than national prevalence estimates, but the consistency across three different school systems is difficult to ignore.

Esports is not simply giving already-involved students one more activity. In many schools, it appears to be reaching students who had not found another place to belong.

That is the piece of esports I believe is frequently undervalued.

If a football program reaches students who identify as football players, theater reaches students who identify as performers, and band reaches students who identify as musicians, esports gives another population an institutional identity inside the school.

For some students, it may be the first time they have one.

Trotter et al. (2022), in one of the early longitudinal examinations of school esports programs, similarly noted the potential for esports to engage adolescents who may not be attracted to traditional sports and therefore may otherwise miss some of the developmental opportunities associated with organized team participation. The research base on scholastic esports is still developing, but this particular function deserves considerably more study.

I no longer see esports as an interesting alternative activity that schools can provide if they happen to have the equipment or an enthusiastic teacher. I see it as part of the infrastructure of an inclusive school culture.

What Happens After They Enter the Room

The argument becomes stronger when esports research is placed alongside the broader literature on extracurricular relationships.

Knifsend et al. (2018) studied 2,268 adolescents and examined not merely whether students participated in extracurricular activities, but whether they had friends within those activities. Students with stronger friendship connections inside their activities demonstrated stronger school belonging, and belonging mediated relationships with academic engagement and achievement.

The significant variable was not simply membership. The social relationships developed within the activity mattered.

That distinction describes what I see in esports.

Registering a student on a roster is not the intervention. Giving that student enough meaningful time with other students for relationships to form may be.

The larger literature on school belonging supports the same mechanism. Korpershoek et al. (2020) synthesized 82 studies involving more than 200,000 secondary students and found school belonging associated not only with academic achievement but also with engagement, motivation, self-efficacy, and lower absence and dropout.

Belonging is not simply a social benefit occurring beside the academic work of school. It is associated with many of the psychological and behavioral conditions under which academic success becomes more likely.

Research on students with learning disabilities adds another important dimension. Bruefach and Reynolds (2022) found that students with learning disabilities experienced greater social isolation at school. They had fewer friends, reported greater feelings of detachment, and were more likely to perceive themselves as disliked. Social isolation also accounted for a meaningful portion of the difference in high-school graduation associated with learning disabilities, even after previous academic performance was considered.

In the group of students I currently work most closely with through this community, 27 of 30 have IEPs.

Access to peer relationships is not educationally trivial.

When a student has difficulty accessing the normal social structures of a school, providing another legitimate pathway into a peer community may be one of the most consequential things an extracurricular program can accomplish.

For some students, esports appears to be that pathway.

A Team Is Not Enough

Simply creating an esports team, however, does not automatically create community.

If my program existed only for scheduled practices and matches, I do not believe it would have developed into what exists today.

The hours around the competition matter.

The room is open at lunch. Students come during homeroom. They stay after school. Veteran students teach new students. Players from different games interact with one another. Students who are not competing that day still come to watch. A student can enter the room without having to immediately perform socially or competitively.

Most importantly, the social environment is carefully protected.

Any group of adolescents can reproduce exclusion, status hierarchies, ridicule, and cruelty if those behaviors are allowed to define the culture. Coaching esports therefore involves more than coaching games. It means establishing norms, monitoring interactions, interrupting exclusion, integrating new students, and protecting the room as a place where social risk remains low.

That work is part of coaching.

The invitation card is part of that structure.

The open lunch period is part of it.

The five hours a student spends around the same group every week are part of it.

None of those things forces friendship. Together, they change its probability.

Experimental research suggests that this type of deliberate attention to peer environment is meaningful. Allen et al. (2021) randomly assigned adolescents to The Connection Project, an intervention designed to improve peer relationships. Participants subsequently demonstrated stronger peer relationships and greater academic engagement.

Adolescent peer environments are not simply fixed social realities schools must accept. They can be intentionally influenced.

That should matter to esports coaches.

We are not simply supervising what happens on the monitors. We are designing the environment surrounding them.

Esports Belongs in the Culture of a School

I have watched students enter this program barely able to speak to one another and eventually attend dances together, spend time together outside of school, lead teams, mentor younger students, and develop real friendships.

I have watched socially hesitant students become leaders.

I have watched students who once sat alone at lunch reach a point where being alone at school would now require considerable effort.

And I have watched them succeed academically.

The mistake would be to conclude that esports is valuable because playing video games somehow produces those outcomes.

The more compelling interpretation is that esports creates access.

It provides an interest strong enough to bring certain students through the door and a social architecture capable of keeping them there long enough to become connected to other human beings.

For decades, schools have understood that football is about more than moving a ball down a field, theater is about more than producing a play, and band is about more than playing music. These programs occupy important positions in school culture because of the communities, identities, responsibilities, and relationships constructed around the activity.

Scholastic esports deserves to be understood in the same way.

Perhaps even more importantly, emerging evidence suggests that it may be reaching a group of students whom those traditional structures have not reached.

That changes the argument for esports.

We should not be asking whether esports deserves a place beside the other important activities in a school.

We should be asking which students would have no place at all if it were not there.

The games get them through the door.

What we build around those games determines what happens next.

References

Allen, J. P., Narr, R. K., Nagel, A. G., Costello, M. A., & Guskin, K. (2021). The Connection Project: Changing the peer environment to improve outcomes for marginalized adolescents. Development and Psychopathology, 33(2), 647–657. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579419001731

Bruefach, T., & Reynolds, J. R. (2022). Social isolation and achievement of students with learning disabilities. Social Science Research, 104, 102667. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2021.102667

Cho, A., Tsaasan, A. M., & Steinkuehler, C. (2019). The building blocks of an educational esports league: Lessons from year one in Orange County high schools. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3337722.3337738

Knifsend, C. A., Camacho-Thompson, D. E., Juvonen, J., & Graham, S. (2018). Friends in activities, school-related affect, and academic outcomes in diverse middle schools. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 47(6), 1208–1220. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-018-0817-6

Korpershoek, H., Canrinus, E. T., Fokkens-Bruinsma, M., & de Boer, H. (2020). The relationships between school belonging and students' motivational, social-emotional, behavioural, and academic outcomes in secondary education: A meta-analytic review. Research Papers in Education, 35(6), 641–680. https://doi.org/10.1080/02671522.2019.1615116

Langreo, L. (2024, June 7). Gaming is part of teen life. These districts use it for better student outcomes. Education Week.

Trotter, M. G., Coulter, T. J., Davis, P. A., Poulus, D. R., & Polman, R. (2022). Examining the impact of school esports program participation on student health and psychological development. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 807341. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.807341