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"Students applying to college can now get varsity sports scholarships if they excel at competitive play of League of Legends, proving that video games can help you more in life than your parents ever imagined.\nRobert Morris University, a school of about 7,000 located in Aurora, Illinois, is offering to cover 50% of tuition and 50% of room and board to recruit students for its competitive League of Legends teams as part of its newly founded esports program, the school announced earlier this week. It's the first U.S. university to offer scholarships for competitive gamers.\nSee also: How One Video Game Became a Million-Dollar Professional Sport\nWhile colleges haven't necessarily had relationships with esports and gaming in an organized, competitive setting, RMU's esports coordinator Kurt Melcher said once he learned about League of Legends current popularity online \u2014 with about 27 million active players \u2014 it was an easy sell.\n\"When everyone here at the university looked in-depth at the massive population not served by traditional scholarship opportunities, they asked why should that be different from traditional sports,\" Melcher said.\nRobert Morris will have at least three different teams in its varsity program, each with eight to nine players. (League of Legends, a fast-paced multiplayer game, has matches of 5-v-5, so these team sizes allow for substitutions.) There will also be junior varsity teams, Melcher said, with those students offered 25% of their tuition in scholarships.\nMelcher said that since the announcement, the school has already had at least 70 applications and a lot of interested emails sent to its dedicated esports email address. \"We've even waived the application fee so it doesn't seem like a money grab.\"\nThe applicants range from students who have just graduated high school, to transfer students and \"former professionals looking to go back to school,\" Melcher said.\nLeague of Legends has college and high school-level tournaments, as well as offering an online portal where players on different campuses can connect and form clubs. The official Riot Games 2014 Collegiate Tournament offered $100,000 in scholarships to the winning schools.\nHave something to add to this story? Share it in the comments."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2014/06/26/league-of-legends-college-scholarships/>