Day 14: E Sports Hub

 Hi I’m Cate Vickery! I am a sport management major from Alexandria Virginia, and I’m going to be a junior in the fall. Today was a bit of a sleep in which was nice. But I got up and got coffee and pastries with some of the girls. Then the group met up and went and had our lecture of the day in the morning at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). The lecture was about the history of politics and geopolitics within the Olympics and what that’s going to look like this year at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Then we had some free time around lunch and I went with a few girls and got dumplings. After our short lunch break, we all met up again and went over to the University of Technology Sydney’s main campus area. We met there Fadi Chadayda, who works for a company that helps to organizes and create Esports locations and events in universities and other spaces. Fadi showed us around a little bit of the campus and more specifically just the esports section of one of the buildings. We got to see a few different esports rooms, but the main one being a sponsored esports room by Red Bull. it was very cool because everything in that space was sponsored by Red Bull or other companies to help promote esports. Fadi then gave us a little presentation on esports in Australia, the history of it and a little bit about where he thinks it will go in the future as well as what his company does and what his job is. We were given time to play some of the games on the PlayStation 5 or PC consoles. It was very cool as people got to play whatever game they wanted which included FIFA, NBA 2K, rocket league, league of legends Fortnite, and many other games. We were done after that and all were pretty much on her own and split up. I went to a market with a few people, and we looked around and did a little bit of souvenir shopping and mostly just walked around the shops and saw what they had. By then it was almost dinner dinner time so a bunch of us met up at the hotel and went and got Italian food for dinner. Most of us turned in after dinner because we have a fairly early morning in the next morning, and a full day of scheduled activities. Thanks!