AUSTIN – St. Edward's Athletics held a grand-opening celebration for its new esports arena on Tuesday, Dec. 3.

The facility, which is located in the Ragsdale Center, houses both club and varsity esports programs. The project featured a campus-wide collaboration between athletics, recreation and wellness and the office of information technology.

"Today, went wonderfully," head coach David Willis said. "I think there is a lot of great interest just here in Austin, especially from the local school districts that are super excited to get to participate in esports. I think that St. Edward's is heading up the way for Austin, as a city, both collegiately and for high schools to look at and see what a great program is going to be doing in the future."

The celebration featured comments from Willis, St. Edward's President George E. Martin, Associate Vice President for Athletics Debbie Taylor and Leslie Harlien, vice president of state and local government and education strategy at Dell Technologies. It also included a blessing from SEU Director of Campus Ministry Father Peter Walsh.

"I think this is an exciting time on campus to develop a new esports program in this state-of-the-art esports arena," Martin mentioned in his opening comments. "As a part of our extensive university strategic plan, esports was identified as a viable, exciting and strong addition to the already robust student life that we have."

"We're really excited to have this space," Taylor said. "The opportunities that it presents to our students, not only our varsity esports program, but all of the students that are in our esports club. It's such a growing enterprise and more and more students are coming into college with the experience and interest, and so this gives them a space to come together, whether it's just to be with people of the same interests or to come together and practice and get ready for competition."

"First of all, you look at the industry and the industry is over a billion dollars and growing very rapidly," Harlien added. "For (St. Edward's), this is really a key differentiator to come and attract and retain students."

The arena includes 20 Alienware computers with monitors, peripherals and gaming chairs. The computers include a 7th-gen Intel 9700 K processor and a 2070 NVIDIA GPU.






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