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For any parent who has fretted about their kids playing video games all day, here’s a reason to relax. Esports — team video game competition — is coming to more college campuses and some schools are treating these digital leagues like traditional sports, complete with recruiting, on-campus arenas and scholarships to entice students. “There’s a phrase out there —…

The idea of colleges fielding teams for video games, an oddity just several years ago, now supports an athletic conference and is seeing major growth. What was perhaps a wild pipe dream decades ago, merely a Dorito-fueled teenage daydream, has come true: colleges are paying students scholarships to play video games.

The esports industry has boomed in recent years, commanding an audience of nearly 150 million people who are tuning in to watch competitive gamers. Now enthusiasts can even get a scholarship to attend college based on their skills. Across the US, 34 colleges offer competitive gaming as a varsity sport.

Professional esports — competitive video game playing as a spectator sport — is surging in the US, with revenues in the hundreds of millions and growing fast. So it’s little surprise that collegiate esports — in which universities field their own teams just as they would for baseball or basketball — has been been growing as well, to the…

Just seven colleges fielded varsity esports programs as of last July. Now, nine months later, there are 34 varsity esports programs across the country and some officials project as many as 50 to 60 schools will sponsor an esports team by the next academic year. Varsity esports looks very much like other sports programs, with full-time paid coaches, scholarships,…

An all-women's college became a pioneering institution in esports Thursday. Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, will be the first women's college to sponsor a varsity esports program. The Stars will field an Overwatch team starting in Fall 2017...