In Fall 2016, research and discovery began with the simple focus of finding energy on campus in students and seeing what they were interested in specifically. This all spawned from one simple question from the CIO of IT at the time, "What is Twitch?". From the beginning to now, Mike "Moog" Aguilar, started exploration of the topic and finding paths.
At the time in U.S. & Canada there were less than 25 institutionally supported esports programs in higher education versus over 250 in 2020. For the first several months pinging other institutions, researching the industry, and coupling it with general gaming and OU specific cultures resulted in a singular event in April 2017 that served as the kick off.