Brady Girardi is the envy of many teens. Not only is he allowed to play video games as much as he wants, he also gets paid for doing it.
The seventeen-year-old Lethbridge gamer is an Esports player for the Immortals Overwatch team.
He’s been playing video games most of his life but has faced some opposition in the massive amount of hours he’s been at the controls.
“I think I was constantly nagging at him to turn off the game and go outside,” Brady’s mom Sharon Ulrich said. “Go be social. We got into a few battles about that for sure.”
The nagging never really stopped Brady though. When he was sixteen, he worked ahead on his online school work to free himself up to play a new game called Overwatch. He played the game constantly, and was a natural from the beginning.
“I made it to top 50 in North America my first time playing, which is pretty good,” Girardi said. “So I realized after that this could be an actual possibility for me to play professionally.”
After he was signed by Immortals, Girardi moved to Los Angeles to join his teammates.
“I kind of thought I wouldn’t be able to handle it,” Girardi said. “I do miss my family a lot, but I get to see them every once in a while, so that makes it easier. And I get to see my dogs through FaceTime. But it has been a good adjustment.”
Brady and his team practice six hours a day, six days a week, along with several hours of video review of their online matches, it’s a lot of work, but he loves doing it.
“It’s really cool that I get to do this,” Girardi said. “I’d be playing video games if I weren’t doing it for a job… It’s just practicing, because that’s what you need in video games to be at the top level.”
Girardi receives a monthly salary, and his seven-person team split 90 per cent of the money they win in tournaments. Which, for some events, is very significant. At a tournament in Texas, his team won $100,000.
The decision to move to L.A. is proving fruitful.
And while his mom may have needed convincing, she’s fully on board now. She watches all his tournament games, and can even tell when he’s not on his ‘A’ game.
“Oh yeah, I can tell when he’s not playing well, I’ve watched him enough now to know,” Ulrich said. “I say to myself, ‘get your head in the game Brady focus’ so it’s interesting. It’s kind of like cheering him on when he used to play soccer.”
In addition to playing with team Immortal, Brady is also competing in the Overwatch World Cup for team Canada.
Comments