One of my earliest experiences of developing partnerships with external organizations and getting resources was in high school when I organized one of the first e-sports computer game tournament in Malaysia around 2008 as part of my Computer Club activities at Klang High School. I polled my Computers Club members on the activities that they would enjoy organizing. Most of them said they would love to organize a Dota computer game tournament but felt it was impossible as mere high school students. It is notable that at the time, e-sports was not as common as it is today. There was no precedence to organizing such a tournament in Malaysia at the time, certainly not as high school students.
I enjoyed a challenge and decided to organize the tournament as our Club’s main activity for the year. I managed to convince the company that was the local distributor of the computer game to obtain software licenses to use for our tournament. The company was also generous enough to throw in merchandises worth thousands of dollars for us to use as prizes since they really liked our initiative. Since we only have about 10 computers at my high school, the next problem to solve was finding a place with enough computers to host the competition. I convinced a local college with massive IT facilities to host our competition by telling them that hosting the competition was a great opportunity to advertise their college facilities to high school students who are about to graduate and enter college themselves. Till today, my friends still have fond memories of us collectively achieving the seemingly impossible.
Also, obviously we could not just call it a game tournament as a school event circa 2008, so it was branded as an “Intra-school Computer-based Eye-Hand Coordination & Strategy Competition”.
