University Of Southern Mississippi's Esports Coordinator David Dickert On Developing Healthier Habits In Gaming
David Dickert is currently serving as the Esports Coordinator for the University of Southern Mississippi. Dickert’s role as the Esports Coordinator is to ensure that students are having a great student experience while planning everything that has to do with esports at the University.
The University of Southern Mississippi has esports programs in all of the games that NACE offers.
“I think Fitgmr has a huge part to play. That stereotype is something that I have been fighting for the better part of my entire life. Dipping into health and wellness is incredibly important. Not just physical health in terms of getting up and moving, but also taking care of your eyesight since you are staring at a screen all the time and making sure you have glasses that can handle that and making sure that your eyes don’t get damaged,” Dickert said. “After a lot of news related to esports injuries to carpel tunnel, health and wellness is how we prepare this next generation for those hurdles.”
As part of our WellPlayed interview series, David Dickert talks about how collegiate esports isn’t all about the practice in-game, but the routines and warmups you set up for these players outside of just the game itself. A lot of professional gamers get into the esports scene young and develop negative postural habits that can lead to esports-related injuries such as carpal tunnel and lower back pain. Dickert and University of Southern Mississippi hope that they can help students develop better routines around mindfulness and health so that they can move forward in a healthy manner.
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Sage got his start in esports as a volunteer writer in 2016 for esports organization, Dignitas. Since then, he has continued to work on his craft as a journalist and reporter for a number of established esports publications, such as esports.gg, Unikrn, Akshon Esports, Howla, The Player’s Lobby, Nerd Street Gamers, and most recently Dot Esports. Now, as a member of Esports Illustrated’s content team, Sage’s primary duties are centered around creating groundbreaking written and video content about the esports industry that impacts the community in a meaningful way. Sage graduated from Rutgers University with a Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology and Informatics. There, he was a member of the Rutgers Esports Executive Board, both as the head of the fighting game community and a videographer/photographer for the Content team.