Esports takes centerstage at Schine
Esports takes centerstage at Schine
With the new gaming center set to open Friday, Syracuse esports aims to do even better building a community on campus.

Ryan Blankenhorn has a special niche when casting games.
Every time the 20-year-old casts a Syracuse esports game, he always puts on a Hawaiian shirt under his blazer, and then a pin of a flamingo, a penguin or a dragon on the lapel.
From a large Veterans Day event featuring more than 60,000 people to the Power Esports Conference (PEC) games every week at the Barnes Center, Blankenhorn makes sure that the Hawaiian shirts show up, even the sillier ones that have flowers and aloha plants on them.
Although Blankenhorn didn’t go through broadcast training, his performing experience in theater prepared him well enough to take on the job.
“I was already pretty comfortable in front of people,” Blankenhorn said. “So in front of the camera, when there weren’t people in front of me technically, it was kind of easy.”
Blankenhorn started casting and slowly perfecting his skills when he first went to Shenandoah University. There he worked closely with Joey Gawrysiak, now the executive director of esports at Syracuse University, and Sean Kelly, the director of production and outreach.
“As I came here to Syracuse, Sean and Joey still wanted me to continue casting, help to get the program up with their casters here,” he said.
During the first proper esports semester, Blankenhorn and his cohorts had only a small corner in the esports room at Barnes Center dedicated to broadcasting. While Newhouse students could use more than a dozen screens to broadcast ACC games, the esports broadcasters had to crawl into a tiny broadcast room inside the esports room that could barely contain three people at the same time.
Blankenhorn’s working space to some extent reflects Syracuse’s developing esports program last semester: trying to do everything in limited space. But the program is growing, and so will the space for Blankenhorn to cast. The spring semester will be quite different for the whole Syracuse esports community. A new facility at Schine Student Center will officially open on Friday.
‼️GRAND OPENING TOMORROW‼️
— Syracuse Esports (@Cuse_Esports) January 16, 2025
Our friends at Pepsi Syracuse will be raffling off a VR headset tomorrow at the end of our opening ceremony!
Don't miss out!⭐️ pic.twitter.com/acqFhtb3Yy
“We don’t want just community,” Gawrysiak said. “We don’t want just a club; we don’t want just broadcasts, or just competitions, or just academics. We literally want it all. And that’s really hard and really daunting, but we’re getting there one piece at a time. And a new facility is going to help us support the kind of programs that we have in the communities we want to build.”
Gawrysiak said the new esports room will approximately be twice as large compared to the current one. The new facility offers 24 PCs and 18 consoles. Additionally, the 5,600-square-foot room features sim-racing, virtual reality headsets and tabletop games.
“We want to have opportunities for any student that’s interested in any kind of gaming on campus,” he said. “Whether it’s video games, tabletop games, VR, whatever it might be.”
The new esports room also has a stage for varsity games, a broadcast area and an actual control room. Gawrysiak thinks it can help drive the program forward and build a larger esports community in SU.
“Getting people to understand what we’re doing, and get them to know that we do exist, I think we have to show them,” he said. “It’s showing them what we’re doing in that space in Schine because it’s in the middle of campus. It’s glass windows for a reason.”
“I think once we’re able to move in that space, get students working on programming in that space, we’re able to show students, faculty, staff and the community, what we’re able to offer. That will increase their knowledge of what esports is, what gaming is on campus, what it can be in higher education.”
Blankenhorn hosted a teaser event at Schine without all the equipment earlier on Veterans Day, but he is already excited about the upcoming full release.
“I’m really looking forward to it. Especially because of the change where we were in Barnes, that tiny little room,” he said.
Stepping up the esports broadcast game
Kelly, overseeing both broadcasting and social content for Syracuse Esports, said Syracuse Esports’ X account eclipsed over 1,100 followers last semester. Although the engagement in live streaming of varsity games was lower than expected, Kelly believes that the new facility will help.
“I foresee next semester being a massive jump in what we can do,” he said. “The quality will be through the roof from what we’ve been able to do over the last year. We’ve been kind of running on piecemeal setups and kind of Band-Aid solutions. And what we will have in Schine will be above the industry standard currently set in college.”
Currently, there aren’t a lot of assets and filler content in the livestream. Students jumping in during the downtime between games can only see a be-right-back screen. But Kelly thinks Schine makes great online experience possible.
“Ideally we want to run a full show,” he said. “We want to have people on the desk. We want to have stats, we want to have replays, we want to have all these things. Barnes is smaller. It wasn’t meant for that. So we were retrofitting a space to just make sure that we could get games out. Shine will allow for it.”
New room will lead esports program to new heights
On the other hand, the program encourages students to get involved with esports by hosting different events like Dungeons and Dragons nights and watch parties. By moving into the new facility, Meg Danaher, the assistant director of esports who oversees the esports club and community engagement, thinks they can offer even more opportunities.
“Esports has been on the outskirts of the periphery of student engagement just because it’s literally in a basement and the far end of the Barnes facility,” Danaher said. “But now we have a more forward-facing position on campus, we can now activate a lot more vocally, so we can actually host events and hopefully get a lot more traction because the student center is the most traffic space on campus.”
Anna Kim, an 18-year-old sophomore, has been working as the esports room staff for about a year now. The esports room has many rules. Among them: no nicotine, no open drink, no disrespectful remarks, and definitely no banging on the table. Being quite a rulekeeper, Kim patrols the room quite often to make sure everyone is behaving well.
About every 15 minutes, Kim would quietly walk back and forth between the rows of PCs. She checked if everyone is following those rules. Immersed gamers don’t notice the girl in white passing by behind them. If one gets behind the casters, she would immediately make herself present, “Please find a place to sit. You’re on the camera.”

By next January, Kim will have a new place to patrol and need to have training for new equipment like sim-racing and VR headsets. She also still has to keep students away from the stage area, which is only for varsity use.
But she is excited about the new facility at Schine too, about its stage, production room and glass walls.
“The glass walls are nice,” she said. “I hope people like it. It’s also really good engagement stuff because people who see from the outside will be, ‘Oh my god, there’s VR.’ So they would just go, ‘Okay, time to play VR.’”
Standing in the middle of the traffic and having glass walls for students to peek inside, the new esports room at Schine is sure to become an eye-catcher.
Blankenhorn believes that casters are a requirement for esports. Casters will be there on the stage for people who have no idea what is going on in the game.
“The casters’ job is not to walk up to that person who just ordered a cheeseburger and be like, ‘So let me tell you what’s going on here.’” He said. “Their job is to make you want to have a passion to cheer for someone. If a caster is doing their job right, you should understand that if a team gets all six kills, they likely win a fight, which means they likely win the game. They understand that, they grow passion. They grow passion, they’re interested in esports. People more interested in eSports grow its popularity.”
And next year at Schine and through the glass walls, students will see a stage, a broadcast room, and a caster in a Hawaiian shirt at the desk doing play-by-play.