With a Major League Soccer partnership, Philly esports hub Nerd Street helps kids learn through gaming 

Some Philly kids spent their entire summers playing video games — and their mentors couldn’t have been more proud.

That’s because they were at Nerd Street which hosts hundreds of young Philadelphians for summer camps and programs. New for the local esports company is a partnership with the Union, Philly’s Major League Soccer team, as well as a joint internship offering with workforce development org Philadelphia Youth Network.

The idea behind all of it: to use gaming as a pipeline to gain experience and skills.

 “We always find a way to kind of tie it back to teaching them teamwork and collaboration and leadership,” Ydian Velez, coordinator for events, camps and youth programming at Nerd Street, told Technical.ly. “All the same skills that they’re getting at a traditional sports camp, they’re getting at our esports camp.” 

Summer is the busiest time of year for esports company Nerd Street between its own camps and other programming. The company’s main summer camp program is Camp Localhost which runs from early June to the end of August. It’s targeted toward middle school-aged kids who come in for week-long sessions where they have access to a variety of gaming activities, according to Velez. 

Nerd Street’s Philadelphia space, Localhost Philly, partnered with Philadelphia Parks and Recreation for the last few years to offer discounted programming and field trips. 

Throughout the summer, around 800 kids will visit Localhost as part of this program, per Velez. Separately, Nerd Street also runs a dedicated week of Camp Localhost, for free, just for Parks and Rec campers. 

“The Philadelphia Parks and Rec program is something near and dear to my heart,” Velez said, “that partnership, because it’s all about access and opportunity and bringing kids here that don’t get an opportunity to get here all the time.” 

IRL sports meet virtual gaming via a Union partnership 

New this summer, Nerd Street, which has been around since 2016, is partnering with the Union for a combined soccer and esports camp at the Union’s esports Hub at Subaru Park. 

Through this program, Velez found that the esports element reinforced the teamwork skills the Union teaches at its usual camps. 

The first chunk of the day, Nerd Street runs video gaming programming, like a tournament. The game Rocket League is especially fun in that context because it’s basically soccer with cars, Velez said. 

Later in the day, Union coaches come in and play soccer with the kids for a few hours. The kids get to play on the Union’s actual fields and sometimes the team’s players will come as well, she said. 

Then the kids go back to gaming to end the day. This camp ran once a month this summer, with its last cohort in early August.

Nerd Street also hosts other education programs at Localhost, like the tech workforce development program Launchpad. These other organizations bring their programming into the space, but they have access to Localhost’s equipment. 

“The type of programs that they’re running, the type of coding that they’re doing, the type of things that they need to do, they probably wouldn’t have access to in another space,” Velez said. “We have this equipment that runs everything that they need.” 

Nerd Street tries to build its programming based on what the most popular games are that year, but because that changes year to year, Nerd Street can get creative with updating its curriculum. 

Older teens get real-world job experience at Nerd Street, too

Nerd Street is also invested in helping young people prepare for adulthood through internship opportunities. 

This is not the first year that the company hosted interns, but it is its first time partnering with the Philadelphia Youth Network, which connected hundreds of young people to paid internships and part-time jobs this summer throughout the city. 

Zakai Ballard, 19, is an avid gamer, playing games as a form of relaxation and escapism. He’s a computer science student at Bloomsburg University and never really thought about gaming as a career until this summer. 

While working at Nerd Street, Ballard said he noticed a lot of similarities between computer science and game design, like coding and programming.

“I don’t really take gaming seriously, but if I could, it probably would be an interesting career to go into,” he said. 

For Nerd Street, the internships are not about recruiting people into the gaming industry, the goal is to teach young people life skills they can take with them, Ben Beaver, head of programming at Nerd Street, told Technical.ly.

 A specific focus has been financial literacy and showing them how to work with budgets and income statements. Teaching those skills translates outside of the internship and helps them prepare to pay for college or how to manage their finances, he said.

Another intern, 19-year-old Taran Taylor also isn’t interested in gaming as a career. He wants to finish trade school and become a carpenter. However, the internship taught him professional skills like how to complete income statements and write emails. 

Ballard and Taylor both spent the summer helping the kids at Nerd Street’s camps and planning an NBA 2K tournament event, a basketball video game, for their final internship project. 

“I learned a lot about responsibility because I got to manage kids every single time I come here,” Ballard said. 

Velez and Beaver also taught the interns the behind-the-scenes work that goes into planning events, like putting together budgets and marketing plans, finding partners and figuring out who the target audience is. 

“Trying to help them become more financially literate is important,” Beaver said. “Also just teaching them responsibility, and event management, which I think it also translates very well to any industry.”