Dina Gentile: Closing the E-sport Management Gap
With the ever-rising popularity of large gaming conventions like the Northeast’s PAX East already featuring major panels like, “Breaking into E-sports” and local businesses popping up like BIT BAR in Salem, Mass., it is not a huge surprise that education professionals are interested in tapping into the E-sports and gaming markets. Professor, Sport Management, Dina Gentile is actively doing just that here at Endicott College.
Gentile is already a published author two times over. Back in August 2009, she published Teaching Sport Management: A Practical Guide, and in April 2019 she produced Athletic Administration for College, High School, Youth, and Club Sport. In 2021, she will be launching an entirely different style of book steeped in her years of sport management teaching experience, The Management of E-sports.
Gentile was instrumental in the creation of Endicott’s E-sport Management minor last fall and after she completed her most recent book, her publisher, Jones & Bartlett agreed that a new book on the up-and-coming world of E-sports would be timely. Both they and Gentile agree that there is currently a lack of educational materials about E-sport management and her upcoming publication will fill the void.
Gentile says, “In creating syllabi, there were no textbook resources to support the program of study. So, I decided to take advantage of a gap in classroom resources and embark on writing this text. E-sports is a new discipline on college campuses, and we are seeing an explosion of E-sports athletic teams at the professional, college, high school and youth levels in national and international markets.”
Similar to her previous book, Athletic Administration: College, High School, Youth and Club Sports, the format will consist of current concepts in the field, as well as feedback and interviews from the specific area’s predominant professionals. It will be groundbreaking in an educational sense, as much of the history of E-sports has yet to be documented as it is currently evolving around us. Gentile hopes that the text will provide classroom support as the primary textbook for E-sports introductory courses at Endicott and beyond.
She says, “This text will encompass so many dynamic topics and arms of E-sports. Since the industry is fairly new, many professionals in traditional athletic programs will find the organization and information contained in the text to be useful as different programs emerge across college and high school campuses. For students in sport management and communication fields, this text will be a tool to navigate the administrative, marketing, and revenue generation arms of E-sports.”
At the moment, Gentile is still deep in the trenches of book writing, pushing hard toward her 2021 deadline. She says, “I am in the process of intense research and I am making connections with various professionals in the field.”
You don’t have to look very hard to see de-motivated writers. In fact, there are entire forums dedicated to writer’s block solutions and different productivity hacks, but Gentile does not have a problem producing her content. She says, “My process of writing is simple–I just sit down and type! I am highly-motivated to gather as much research as possible, and then I add my perspective on the topic to complement each section and then each chapter gets sent out for external review and any feedback I receive is analyzed. The most difficult part of writing is the end when all of the information is set, and we have to ensure all citations are correct and all images are approved. Getting approvals for images takes a great deal of time, so there are times when I just create a visual with the help of the art production team assigned to this text.”
If you look inside Gentile’s previous books, you will be able to see that she values visual teaching aides as well as actionable wording. As E-sports is an area of spectacle, we expect that the new book will be flashier than the last two, but just as helpful to those interested in the management of sport.
To learn more about Endicott’s Sport Management minors, including E-Sport Management, please visit endicott.edu/academics/schools/sport-science-fitness-studies/minors.