Like a lot of kids growing up, Gabriel Ray loved sports. He played basketball and track at Parkersburg High and loved competing in something that matters.
Also, like a lot of kids, he played video games growing up. It was more of a hobby and in between the spaces of the other activities, but it was still part of his life.
Despite being a multi-billion dollar industry, many people still see esports in the same way: as a hobby. Even after linking up with WVU’s esports programs as both an undergrad and graduate student, even Ray wasn’t quite sure about the viability of a career in the industry.
“I was always skeptical,” he says. “I never thought I'd have a full-time job. That was always a dream.”
And yet, just months after completing his master’s degree in sport management, Ray will start as the Esports Manager at Virginia Tech at the ripe age of 22.
Ray graduated from Parkersburg High in 2021 and had missed out on visiting an array of colleges due to the lingering effects of the COVID pandemic, but was comfortable following his brother to Morgantown and WVU. Originally a cybersecurity major, he volunteered at a “Let’s Play WV” event that featured kids shooting around before a basketball game and wound up learning more about the sport management program at WVU. He listened and switched his major.
Soon, a job listing caught his attention: the WVU Esports team was looking for a play-by-play broadcaster for its live streams. Ray was high on enthusiasm but low on experience, (“I’d never spoken into a microphone before”), but he decided to apply anyway. He thinks back to that interview and isn’t exactly sure what he said, but it was enough to convince Josh Steger, Director of Competitive Esports, to give him the job. He’s grateful to this day that Steger believed in him right off the bat.
And then he got to work and started to prove him right to have that belief.
The characteristics that make a good esports broadcaster are exactly the same as to what makes a good broadcaster. He built strong relationships with the players and those around the games. That helped him gain insight into the intricacies of the games, but also into the mindset of the players. He understood that not every viewer came to the broadcasts with the same level of in-depth knowledge of the games and that his role was to help make connections between what was happening to what people could understand.
“I think my job as a broadcaster was to bridge the gap for people,” Ray says. “I don't know Rocket League as much as our players do, but at the end of the day, it’s car soccer, right? For the sake of parents and friends, I relate it to soccer.
“In the past, I’ve compared one of our Valorant players to Steph Curry, because he’s a really good sharpshooter,” Ray continues. “I then say that you have to double-team him every time you see him on the site. People understand those connections.”
Ray went from having never spoken into a mic to getting plenty of repetitions. He worked WVU matches, and the esports universe also opened itself up, and he got other opportunities on nights and weekends throughout his career. As his broadcasting career developed, so did the program around him. Together with two other students, Ray helped found the Esports Skill Development Club, a competitively focused organization designed to support varsity events and serve as a pipeline for student workers in the program. It was his first significant experience building something from the ground up, working alongside Steger and others to give it structure.
Despite the switch in majors, Ray still managed to graduate in three years, earning one of the program's first minors in esports management along the way. He then stayed at WVU as a graduate assistant and expanded his roles considerably, which pushed him in a new direction.
Rather than being primarily on the mic, he was now managing people and operations. He supervised the undergraduate broadcast team, helped interview prospective student employees, and took over as supervisor of the Collegiate Gaming Club. He traveled with teams to events and was responsible for the group on the road. He coached incoming student casters on game knowledge and on-air presence. He also taught an undergraduate esports course, one he had never gotten to take himself.
The position was new when he stepped into it. Steger and Michael Carvelli, the program's marketing strategist, had an outline, but the role took shape as Ray went, which meant he had to make decisions without a template to follow – a skill and familiar theme for him.
Most programs find success in one area, whether a single dominant title, a strong community program, or an academic track. WVU built all of it, driven by two people pushing in the same direction. Steger built a varsity program that competes at the national level across multiple titles while creating real opportunities for student workers to develop professional skills. Dana Voelker, director of the School of Sport Sciences, built the academic side from the ground up, from an esports minor to an on-campus major, with an online version launched most recently.
"To have a big campus, a big student body, a big brand, and also be really good at esports is very, very rare," he said. "I don't think I've seen a school get that much buy-in from the university as a whole."
Faculty were open to the emerging field from early on, letting students connect coursework to esports in ways most programs would not have entertained.
“Dr. Lhotsky was very open to letting me do esports for class projects," Ray says. "Dr. Bravo was huge in helping me connect ethics from traditional sports to esports."
That combination, as much as anything specific he learned in a classroom or behind a microphone, is what prepared him for the opportunity at Virginia Tech.
When Ray started looking for jobs, he was not exclusively focused on esports. He applied for traditional sports facility and equipment management positions, the kinds of roles a sport management graduate might naturally pursue. Nothing came back.
"I still have a passion for traditional sports," he said. "So I was applying to a whole bunch of facility jobs, equipment management stuff. Never got a bite."
Steger stepped in. He connected Ray with people in his network, flagged openings, and pushed him toward opportunities he might have talked himself out of. Then one day, a link showed up in Ray's messages.
"He said, 'I think you should apply to this,'" Ray recalls. "I asked if he knew anybody there. He said no, he just saw it on LinkedIn. But he thought I should throw my name in."
Ray applied, went through two rounds of interviews, drove to Blacksburg for a campus visit, and got the offer. Virginia Tech's program had been open for one semester. He will be its first full-time esports employee.
His plan, informed by what he watched Steger build at WVU, is to start with the community. Get students in the door, build a culture around the games, and let competitive talent surface from within.
"When you have 40,000 students on campus, you're bound to have students who are really good at games," he says. "Build the community first, and then you pull those kids out."
It is a different model than WVU's, and deliberately so. What worked in Morgantown does not translate directly to Blacksburg, and Ray is clear-eyed about that. His job is to take what he knows and utilize that to build what fits.
“I can't take exactly what Josh did and copy and paste," he says. “I have to see what my university wants, what the students want, and adapt what I know to be successful for that culture."
He is not nervous about the work. He has been doing some version of it for four years, and he knows where to find answers when he does not have them. It’s about leaving West Virginia for the first time in his life that gives him more pause than the job itself.
“I'm not nervous about the job at all," he said. "I am nervous about a new environment. I need to know where to go when my car breaks down and where to find a barber.”
WVU was among the first universities in the country to offer a sport management degree, back when the career paths in it were not yet obvious. The people who came through that program went out and proved the point.
Esports is in a similar place now. There are still skeptics out there, and Ray has spent years making the case to middle schoolers, parents, and anyone else who would listen that it is more than a hobby. That it can be a career. That it is something that matters.
He is heading to Blacksburg in July to keep proving it.