How did Winthrop become one of the premier collegiate esports programs in the nation?

It all started with a 2017 lecture.

Then-Winthrop athletic director Ken Halpin was co-teaching a class called The History and Current Issues in College Athletics with then-president Dan Mahoney. Mahoney focused on the “history” side of it, Halpin on “current issues.”

Halpin decided to do some research on collegiate esports for a class session.

“The class was fascinated by it because it’s kind of polarizing,” Halpin said. “Whether you play or not, competitive video games is an interesting universe. ... A couple of semesters (later), I really started to kick (the idea) around; it was just of interest to me. Winthrop is an enrollment-dependent institution, so if you can convince more students to come, there’s an economic benefit.”

The estimated average cost of attendance for Winthrop is $31,950 a year for an in-state student and $46,698 for a student from out of state.

An esports program of 12 could yield the university from $350,000 to over $500,000, and if Winthrop could create a sufficiently successful program, students would attend the school and walk on just to play with other top players.

So Halpin began conducting interviews for a head esports coach, which he admits was really weird for him.

“The industry didn’t exist,” Halpin said. “To find resumes with experience was impossible.”

However, Halpin found his needle in a haystack in Josh Sides.

Sides was the inaugural esports head coach at Saint Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa, leading the school’s League of Legends and Overwatch teams in 2018. The Overwatch team posted a 21-4 record, including wins over much larger schools such as Michigan State, Arizona State and Oklahoma. The League of Legends team went 5-1, beating Iowa State to end the regular season.

Despite the success, the Mocksville, North Carolina, native felt like he “was on Mars,” with his sister going through a health scare at the time.

Sides saw the Winthrop head esports job available and decided to pursue it, giving him a chance to keep doing what he loved while also curing his homesickness.

Seeing Winthrop’s esports program tied to the athletics department instead of student life or campus recreation, which Sides said hadn’t been done before, drew him in even more.

“The importance of tying esports to athletics is that the athletics metric of success is winning,” Sides said. “In esports, that’s an obvious metric of success as well. ... That’s not to say that the student experience isn’t important. Content, marketing and things like that are incredibly important as well, but I think esports is at its core competitive. It’s my personal feeling that esports should be in a culture that is driven to compete, trying to compete at the highest level, and I think an athletics program at a university is the right fit for that.”

Winthrop’s esports program kicked off in the spring of 2019 with Sides at the helm. The team played in a room in Winthrop’s Owens Hall.

Overwatch and League of Legends started the following fall with a combined roster of 12 players and found immediate success. The Overwatch team started undefeated, while the League of Legends team was ranked the No. 4 team in the country before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down both of their seasons.

The success that both teams showed was enough for Winthrop administration to maintain its investment in the program, bringing on Rocket League as a varsity esports title in the 2020-21 school year.

That was the year Winthrop put itself on the map as a marquee program with two national championships, beating Northwood 3-2 in the CENC Rocket Leauge National Championship series on May 2, 2021, before beating Maryville 3-1 in the League of Legends College Championship four weeks later.

“(The 2020-21) school year was a big year for us in Rocket League and especially (League of Legends),” Sides said. “The League of Legends national championship, I think you’ll get no arguments from people that think it’s the hardest national championship in collegiate esports to win. A lot of people will say it’s the most prestigious one of all the games.”

However, Winthrop quickly became a victim of its own success.

Heading into the 2021-22 school year, Winthrop’s entire varsity Rocket League roster got poached by other programs. The recruits who were coming into the program to play with those players also went to other schools as a result.

The program was able to field a varsity roster of former club players, but they couldn’t master the same level of dominance.

The near-vertical trajectory of the program, navigating into, out of and through the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, and winning multiple national championships to then losing an entire championship roster all weighed heavily on Sides, who was essentially running things by himself.

Sides took the Winthrop job to be closer to home and keep doing what he loved, but he wasn’t feeling enough support from administration to maintain things. So he left.

“He had burned out,” said current Winthrop athletic director Chuck Rey, who began in the position at interim in December 2021. “He said, ‘I’m not getting what I want and what I need from the program,’ and ended up leaving for about one semester. And in that semester is when the university and (athletic department) recognized the opportunity that esports had at that time in terms of competitive success, the marketability of the program.”

“I’m fortunate that we were around a board and a president that recognized that traditional sports, they certainly have their draw,” Rey said. “But there’s an enormous market for the students in this next generation of esports and to be able to provide an opportunity for enrollment beyond what we have typically driven through traditional athletics in the university.”

Sides returned to Winthrop the following spring after reinforced belief from administration and has been at the helm since, leading the esports program to rapid growth since.

Rey said that the program also received $500,000 from the state budget in 2021 to develop its esports lab.

The program also just entered the second year of a six-year lease of a 6,500-square-foot space at the Lowenstein Building at University Center in downtown Rock Hill. The program also has brought on VALORANT and Super Smash Bros. as varsity sports, with Fortnite coming in the fall; Rocket League was dropped last year but Sides did not rule out a potential return.

Winthrop’s full esports roster features 80 varsity or club members and is expected to grow to 120 next year, and Sides says the budget he’s working with currently is 10 times more than what it was when he started.

That increase in budget allows Sides to recruit nationally and internationally renowned players, such as Greenville native Christian “Peabnut” Londono, a member of the university’s Super Smash Bros. team.

The junior is currently ranked No. 116 in the world in the game, and he’s not the elite roster member.

Freshman Bharat “Lima” Chintipall (No. 29) is also one of the highest-ranked players in the world.

It was at a Winthrop-hosted event — the inaugural annual super-regional Super Smash Bros. tournament hosted at Carowinds called Rock the Winds in 2023 — that helped bring Chintipall to the university.

That collection of talent paved the way for Winthrop’s Super Smash Bros. team to win its first national championship at the College Esports Commissioners’ Cup in Texas on May 5, beating Fisher College 3-1.

Londono calls it the coolest experience he’s had since joining Winthrop’s esports program.

“That was something that we had grinded for as a team,” the 25-year-old said. “And that’s something so fulfilling. And you not only grow with your team, you grow individually as well.”

CJ Wiley remembers bringing to Sides the initial idea of adding a Super Smash Bros. team to the esports program in the spring of 2019, just as it was announced Winthrop would be adding an esports program.

Sides said that the program didn’t have space to sponsor varsity slots for the game at the time, but brought the team on in club form. Sides brought on the game to the varsity level in 2021.

“Prior to joining the official Winthrop esports team, I had created a small team of a bunch of friends on campus who so happened to play Smash and we qualified for nationals as a Smash team,” Wiley said. “So me and a friend of mine, we sought out Josh, and he was really difficult to find, it took us like two weeks. We finally nailed him down one day and said, ‘Hey, this is what we did, this is what we do now, these are the events we run, these are the people we get. Can you take a chance on us and gives us a space in the lab?’ And from then on, there it (was).”

Wiley is the longest-standing member of Winthrop’s esports program as he goes for his second bachelor’s degree and has seen the program change, develop and exceed expectations year after year.

Winthrop’s VALORANT team has been competing in VCT: Challengers since February, the first and only collegiate team to ever qualify for the circuit filled with professional teams.

The two Rock The Winds gaming tournaments were spearheaded by Wiley himself.

To be a part of it is exciting for the 23-year-old — when he thinks about it, that is.

“I don’t think about it very much,” Wiley said. “Despite it being my day-to-day life, it’s never really crossed my mind, but those are my guys. I wanted a certain team, and I was fortunate enough for (Sides) to give me the standing in the room to build my own team. I told him we could win nationals with this team, and then we did.”

Winthrop’s Super Smash Bros. national championship was the school’s second title in two days after the League of Legends team won the National Esports Collegiate Conferences national championship on May 4, sweeping Grand View 2-0.