On a flight home around Thanksgiving, Laurie Lehman got to chatting with the couple sitting next to her.
The esports manager for the Albuquerque public school district was off the clock.
But she quickly found herself deep in conversation with her neighbors about her passion for esports and the numerous doors gaming has opened for students in her district.
Lehman didn’t intend to turn friendly strangers into potential donors. But her passion for her job, and the esports program she’s built from scratch, shone through—even 30,000 feet off the ground.
“I showed them the data and I talked about how important esports is to students’ lives,” Lehman told Education Week in an interview. She plans to meet the couple formally to discuss a potential sponsorship deal for the district’s esports program.
Interactions like this are how Lehman has built one of the most robust and well-funded school-level esports programs in the country—by convincing the right people that “esports are a game-changer.”
She’s partnered with national and international esports federations, persuaded parents and principals alike that esports isn’t just “playing video games in a dark basement,” and turned local and national businesses into repeat sponsors.
The likes of XFINITY and Microsoft have donated computers and gaming equipment; Pepsi has sponsored snacks and drinks for the district’s homegrown esports expo, and Lehman has applied for large and small grants to fund stipends for over 100 esports coaches.
In total, since 2018, Lehman has raised $120,000 for the program, of which $40,000 has gone toward funding mini-scholarships for college-bound students who played esports in high school and esport athletes who competed in state-level championships.
The money has also helped upgrade computer labs in every school in the district. High schools with esports clubs have their own gaming labs; middle and elementary schools have multipurpose labs that can be used for esports.
Education Week spoke to Lehman about her journey from her first career in anthropology to esports manager and mentor to other esports enthusiasts across the world.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve built up an admirable program. What’s immediately on your radar for the new school year?
With esports, funding is always a challenge.
One of our goals is to get the program funded by the district. It isn’t right now.
We will have to defer to the superintendent wanting to bring up our math and reading scores. When you are at the bottom of the nation in math and reading, you are going to be superfocused on that. Our new superintendent has built all these goals and guardrails about what she wants to achieve. She does support us, but they can’t fund us right now with all the focus on math and reading. One of her goals is centered around social-emotional learning, and that’s what esports is aligned to. Even if we got $100,000 every year from the district, it would be great. But we need more than that, to pay for my salary and for the tech guys who work with me to keep our gaming software updated.
We’ve also been trying get the New Mexico legislature to push for an esports day for the state. It’s another way to recognize that esports can be a viable program that helps kids.
By your own estimate, now, over 1,500 APS students are now involved with esports. How did you make sure that program is attractive to a wide range of students?
We believe in an inclusive environment. We believe in a no-cuts program in schools [where every kid gets to stay on the team, regardless of their gaming ability]. Of course, you can have your A-team competing in state finals. There’s nothing wrong with that.
And you have students on the B team trying to move up to learn.
But some kids want to join esports, not because they want to be on the A team. They want to make friends. They might want to get into shout casting, which is like in football, someone talks about the game as it’s going on. We have kids involved in creating videos for social media.
How are you turning esports into a viable career pathway?
There are quite a few courses that would relate to an esports CTE track. But they’re listed under digital technology because that’s the way they began years ago. So right now, there are tracks to data science, information technology, cybersecurity, computer science, physical computing. We want to add more CTE pipelines that are esports-specific.
We met with the district’s CTE director over the summer. The first big course we want to work on is drones and drone training. That would be cool because students could use that in the job market right away after high school. We’re talking to [the CTE director] about how we can get some money to get that going. At the end of the course, you have to take a test to show what you learned. It would be over $1,500 per student. We don’t have that kind of money. We want to have that kind of money, but right now, we don’t.
Your own journey took you from anthropology to esports. How did that happen?
My love of anthropology took me around the world. I traveled and worked for a bunch of magazines with my ex-husband. When you study culture, you realize that pretty much all over the world, people are the same. We all have hopes and dreams and we all care about our families. And you might be living in the jungle in Panama or in New Guinea and you [can] see these people are not that different. It makes me believe that we need to work together more to see how we can help each other. And so, I got into education. And when I got into esports, it was an easy progression.
Esports opened up something to me. They gave me a sense of belonging. They gave me purpose, and every day, I am excited to think about what I can do to help these students and coaches. It’s pretty amazing to find something like that later in your life.
