President Jesse Bodony on USA Esports: "Everybody wants the USA to be amazing at esports" — Part One

During DreamHack Atlanta, Dust2.us' Jeffrey "Mnmzzz" Moore had the opportunity to sit down for an extended interview with Jesse Bodony, the recently-named President and CEO of USA Esports, a body aiming to become the nexus for esports in the United States. The body has taken on the dual tasks of seeking official recognition as the National Governing Body (NGB) for esports in the United States while also navigating the lucrative but controversial world of Saudi Arabia's Esports Nations Cup.

In this two-part interview, Moore and Bodony open the conversation by discussing his background in esports, why more colleges than ever are taking the plunge into esports, and how this momentum fed into the creation of USA Esports.

Part two of the interview will focus on USA Esports' first steps into the world of esports competitions, the trials and tribulations of trying to find a place for esports at the Olympics, and the challenges, opportunities, and controversies of aligning the body with the Saudi Esports Nations Cup.

How has your weekend been here at DreamHack Atlanta?

It's been great. This is my first time in Atlanta. Generally speaking, I like the city. I'm in love with the greenery, and DreamHack has been fantastic. It's always a good time, but getting to connect with all kinds of folks in all corners of the esports and gaming ecosystem has been super fun. Watching some esports, watching Counter-Strike events, everything else going on, it's been great.

You have a collegiate esports background, but how did you gain your start in esports, and where do you come from?

My background is in traditional athletics. I was a soccer player and a tennis player. I played soccer for the University of Oregon, and then I played a little bit professionally out in Colorado with the Colorado Rapids. I came up through the USTA and US Soccer ecosystem, so I have that background. Then I got my graduate degree, and that's where my collegiate esports career started. I founded the esports program at my alma mater while I was doing that and finishing up my schooling. During that time, I also formed a startup with a friend of mine, and we helped colleges and universities get into esports with a bit of an academic twist to it. So we worked with 90 or 100 universities, and that was the pre-pandemic era, so mid-2016, '17, '18, around then.

And then that led me to New York, where I was the director of the Pace University Esports program for about five years. During that time, I also worked for about five years with a nonprofit called VOICE, which stands for Voice of Intercollegiate Esports. It's a research and advocacy group. Broadly, we try to make collegiate esports better. I've been the executive director there for the past three years, and we work with a lot of university presidents and chancellors, and it was that group of presidents and chancellors that actually gave rise to USA Esports. That's how I got into USA Esports at the start of 2025.

So you mentioned the initiative to create USA Esports comes from a very collegiate lens and is backed by a lot of these big players in collegiate sports. Does that give you a unique perspective that helps you be more efficient at your role as CEO and USA Esports more broadly as a pressure group?

Yeah, absolutely. That, having a balanced perspective between understanding the professional side of the esports ecosystem within the United States, but also having a perspective where we can tap into what's going on in the scholastic space and the collegiate space is super useful. Colleges and universities work with a huge number of gamer demographic students in the United States. Like the esports programs, there are probably 700 or 800 in the United States, which probably touch over 100,000 students.

Those presidents and chancellors understood when we brought this to them the importance of this moment. We're at this inflection point for esports in the United States, but also globally. Esports Olympics, nation-based competition, Esports Nations Cup. How can we start a real, robust effort to grow and promote esports in the United States? What does that look like? And that's what led to it.

So these colleges, these presidents, these directors of these schools, why do they care about esports? Why is it of such importance to these large schools to be doing this in-house now?

There are a few general reasons. Every school you ask, it might be slightly different in terms of where their exact orientation is. For one, it's a great enrollment and retention mechanism. The reality of our cultural moment is that 90-something percent of students or kids in America aged 13 to 17 identify as gamers. So if you're trying to stay relevant for a high school demographic, then having formal gaming esports on campus is a huge driver. That's a big piece of it.

Another one is more on the retention side. A demographic of gamers who have historically been a bit disenfranchised haven't been captured in academia or in a college ecosystem, and they've fallen through the cracks a little bit. If you give that demographic on campus, which is huge, a community and a sense of belonging and an affinity for the school, there's fewer more potent things you can do on campus besides that. Then the third is it can offer a lot in terms of making the brand of the institution relevant and topical, and a bit younger in some ways, because esports is a lot of those things.

We see a lot of the schools that are doing particularly well in collegiate esports, like Fisher, Davenport, and Winthrop, these schools that are either private or have under 10,000 enrolled students. Do you think these big schools are now doing this initiative too because they might miss out on this opportunity if they don't get in the game?

Yeah. There is a little bit of FOMO, like, "Oh man, we're losing to a small 4,000-person institution." There's some of that going on. My view on it is a little bit more that this is the natural, organic sequence of development for a nascent activity like esports in colleges. When something's brand new, if you're a younger, smaller institution, you're gonna be more nimble. You can take a bigger swing at an esports program and go all in, and scholarships and the whole thing, and be super good and plant your flag in the sand in a year.

Whereas if you wanna take a serious swing as a Baylor or a Syracuse or a UCLA, there's a lot more pieces. That's a much bigger decision. Mobilizing resources, getting buy-in, it's more slow-moving the bigger you get. But now that we're ten years in on college esports, you do see a lot of the bigger institutions coming up to speed.

What came first in the formation of USA Esports? Was it that you, from your collegiate world, were able to get the colleges on side, and then you had to go to the esports orgs to show them what you're building? Or was it that these esports orgs were the ones that were driving the creation of USA Esports?

There's a quote, and I don't remember who said it or where I got it from. I don't even know if I'm saying the quote exactly right, but it's something to the effect of, "There are few things as powerful as an idea whose time has come." And you probably get the gist of that. When we started talking with these pro organizations, it wasn't as hard as you might think because everybody in the United States, whether you're on the pro side or K12 or collegiate or part of the industry in some other capacity, everybody wants broadly the same thing, which is for the USA to be amazing at esports.

That benefits everybody. More fandom, more engagement, more business opportunity, more prosperity wherever you land within the ecosystem. However we feel about it, international competition is here. You have events that are coming. If we don't get our ducks in a row now, we don't get our stuff together, we're gonna miss this moment. The opportunity is here. The moment is here. Let's come together under one banner. Let's help each other out. Let's all pull on the same lever, and that's gonna result in something that is beneficial for the ecosystem.

We wanna be a good neighbor and do right by everyone. We don't wanna come in heavy-handed and be like, "This is how it has to be. We're gonna do this, that, and the other." We wanna take all the best people and the best minds in the space up and down who have been building it for years and years, bring them to the table, and work collaboratively about how we can grow this in the right way in the United States.

Why is now the right moment? What's the systemic change that has allowed people to mobilize?

There are two factors, and one of the factors is the main factor in my opinion. Part of it, the underlying current is that the industry has been around long enough, where, without international competition, it's a missing pillar of a competitive ecosystem. You look at any other sport in the United States, soccer, baseball, basketball, there's a Team USA to aspire to, which is an important pillar of that competitive ecosystem. So you have esports existing without that for a while, an undercurrent.

But then the sharper, shinier piece is that you have nation-based competition here in a real way. You have the Esports Nations Cup. We'll see what happens with the official Olympic esports games, but it seems like something's gonna happen. So that moment is very here and present, and represents a lot of potential good for the pro orgs, for the colleges, for the universities, to get involved and band together.

Check back in later for part two of our interview which will focus on USA Esports' interactions with the US Olympic committee, the Olympics' fluctuating interest in esports, and the opportunities and challenges that come with aligning USA Esports with the nascent Saudi-backed Esports Nations Cup.