OMAHA (KMTV) — From the gridiron to gaming.
Former Husker Ahman Green has an extensive resume on the football field, and now he’s fulfilling his love of competition in a different way: with esports.
- Video shows Ahman Green helping with and playing video games at an esports camp at Quest Forward High School.
- Green has been playing video games since he was five years old.
- He hopes help young esports players learn valuable lessons applicable in esports and eventually the workforce, such as team work, accountability, respect and more.
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Not only is Ahman Green a Nebraska football hall of famer, he’s also a gamer.
“It was something that started then when I was five and then carried on through high school, back here to Nebraska,” he said. “It was the competitiveness of some of the games, trying to play against somebody to try to beat you. You either win or you lose, you gotta figure it out.”
In addition to coaching athletes in traditional sports, he’s also coaching esports.
“The only really physical thing we have is between your controller or your mouse and keyboard and putting on your headsets,” Green said.
Despite the differences, Green finds skills transfer over from the playing surface to not only video games…
“Goal setting, rules, team rules, team work, respect, accountability, all that ties in the same,” he said.
But also to life.
“You learn how to be somebody that has confidence in themselves, learning how to work with other people and how to talk to other people,” Green said. “Because if they’re not talking a certain way, some people might not listen.”
“Sometimes you need to work by yourself, but other times it’s easier and much more efficient to work as a team,” Maximus Johnson, an incoming eighth grader who attended esports camp at Quest Forward High School, said. “And learning teamwork is a vital component in completing or fulfilling a goal.”
“Concentration and like focus(ing) on stuff,” rising seventh grader and esports player Noah Schaffner said. “It doesn’t matter if you do it in Super Smash Bros, Mario Kart, Minecraft. If you lose your train of thought when you’re doing something important, you probably don’t get it back.”
And no matter if it’s scoring a touchdown or winning a Smash Bros tournament, Green wants kids to keep their competitiveness and succeed in the future.
“Esports gets you out of that comfort zone,” Green said. “And so that’s what I’m gonna do. I try to get them out of that comfort zone. And if they learn one more thing than they did the day before, then that’s a win.”
