Running a school esports league brings a surprising amount of fiddly, time-consuming admin, and doing it all by hand takes a lot of hours. When NZ Esports ran our school league manually, it took a full-time staff member to keep things moving. These days, on School Esports, our account is that one staff member handles the admin for our school and university leagues in about 10 hours a week. I should be upfront that I'm the CEO of NZ Esports and also one of the founders of School Esports. The figures here come from our own account of our league, rather than independent research or a like-for-like workload study.
What does running a school esports league by hand involve?
A fair bit of chasing, and for us it was a full-time job. The starting point I'm describing is our 2023 setup: two games on offer for one eight-week competition, and a dedicated, full-time salaried staff member to run it. In our account, those 40 hours a week went into sending out Google Forms and Excel sheets for registration, confirming rosters, sending reminders, setting up Discords with hundreds of team roles so students could find each other more easily, moderating those Discords, recording screenshots of post-game scores in the lobby, putting draws together by hand, then pulling the scores together and checking them again. And that was just during tournament season. Chasing teachers for registrations and planning game usage added up too. A lot of it was the same checking over and over, like whether a teacher had approved a team or whether a result was right.
Why couldn't NZ Esports charge schools or add more games?
Because we didn't feel the service justified a fee, and we didn't have the staff hours to take on more games. Often, through no fault of our staff, draws took days to get out, and plenty of games were defaulted because teams couldn't make the scheduled times. In our experience, schools weren't seeing the value, which made introducing school fees a real challenge.
What changed in our first season on School Esports?
Our account of that first season is that we went from two games to nine straight away, without any extra overhead. That meant we could keep that year free of charge, without adding a registration fee, and we grew from 30 teams to nearly 140. By our count, 87% of our matches that season were completed without admin intervention. That is our reported season figure, separate from the platform-wide figure on the School Esports website, and it isn't a measure of hours saved. We found we were spending less time on routine admin, and our staff could spend more of it recruiting schools and chatting with teachers at schools that hadn't started esports yet.
How does School Esports cut down the chasing?
By bringing registration, approval, fixtures and results into one place, and letting teams handle routine coordination within the competition's rules. School Esports was built independently with national federation expertise. In teacher-validated events, teachers can review student-created entries; teacher-created entries still follow the event's approval and eligibility requirements. For head-to-head fixtures, teams use Request Reschedule to propose a permitted new time before the displayed deadline, and the opponent must accept it for the recorded fixture to change. One side submits the score for the opponent to confirm or dispute. The platform sends confirmation reminders, and authorised staff can review unresolved submissions and disputes. These workflows can reduce repeated record-keeping and organiser message-passing. Disputes and exceptions still need a person.
What does NZ Esports' school league look like now?
In 2026, our reported figure is 390 school teams competing each year in the secondary school competition, and we also run a university league and a primary and intermediate league. Our account is that the admin for those leagues takes one staff member about 10 hours a week. Those figures come from a different period and a much wider scope than our 2023 setup, so they aren't a tidy before-and-after comparison with that original full-time role. My honest summary of our experience is that we're doing significantly more, with significantly less.
Where does the saved admin time go?
Into the work that needs a person. Our staff can now help schools get their esports programmes going and grow them, instead of spending their time just keeping the league running. There's more room for the cases that need judgement, like supporting a new school or sorting out a dispute. We can also consider entry fees where appropriate, rather than assume every league has to be free, and put time into creating amazing LAN experiences, scholastic academy teams and all the things we'd hoped would come from a successful league. That doesn't mean all our current competitions charge an entry fee.
You can also read about teacher oversight, private chat and moderation and the business case for a school league.
