Every year, CISP fields teams for soccer, volleyball, basketball, swimming, badminton, and more. They have even developed a high-performance academy for soccer and volleyball. Conversely every year, a growing group of talented, committed students has had nowhere to put their competitive drive. They’re not on the pitch or in the pool. They’re training five nights a week in ranked matches, studying replays like film, and coordinating team strategy with the same discipline as any varsity captain. Until now, none of that has earned them a jersey.
That’s changing. CISP Esports Academy is a venture proposal to build Phnom Penh’s first credentialed esports academy. It is modeled directly on CISP’s own Soccer and Volleyball Academy supported by a free Foundation Track for every student, a paid Development Academy open to the wider Phnom Penh community, and an Elite Squad competing under the CISP name.
My venture pitch site walks through the full case: the gap at CISP and across the city, what the Academy actually looks like tier by tier, the research behind why scholastic esports works, how the model pays for itself, who would run it, and what it would take to get started.
It’s not just a pitch for a new club. It’s a pitch for a new institution to help students compete, to learn, and to grow in a prospering and revenue rich field.
CISP ESPORTS ACADEMY VENTURE PITCH
FEEDBACK: I really enjoyed reading through the CISP Esports Academy pitch. Good work. Building a program to capture students already scrimmaging and studying match replays of videogames is a brilliant way to validate their competitive drive intrinsically. Your background as a former pro gamer and current educator gives this pitch an incredible amount of credibility.
Through an EVA lens, tying the competitive tiers to a Career and Tech Foundations elective is a massive strength. It shifts the venture from an after school gaming club into a legitimate educational pathway. As a teacher who has run Jazz Combos and Choir, I know how hard it is to get administrative buy in and funding for extracurriculars on top of defending a new core elective pitched to the board. The way you depicted your two sided business model relying on external tuition to eventually self fund is a smart way any fixed school budgets restraints that might be faced.
My biggest question is definitely around local marketability in Phnom Penh and Cambodia. Convincing external families to pay for Esports coaching instead of traditional tutoring, music lessons, or established sports like soccer/basketball might be a tough sell initially. I also worry about hidden costs associated with maintaining the technology required to make this meaningful for students year after year, especially as it relates to the costs of the games themselves and the hardware requirements to make gameplay enjoyable.
Funding recommendation: I am not able to fund this venture at this time. While I would consider approving the first year pilot budget to get the Foundation Track running, I need greater market research demonstrating external families are willing to pay for the Development Academy before investing and scaling further into the local community. Thanks for sharing!