Rise Nation announced that they are going to be stepping into competitive Madden with the signing of their newest member, TRaw.
TRaw has had a strong start to his professional Madden career. He won last year’s Madden Online Qualifier. “I’m as hungry as ever and looking forward to making my mark in Madden. I’m going to do this for all my supporters, as well as for all the people who said I wasn’t going to make it,” he said in Rise Nation’s announcement.
This is a huge announcement for not only Rise Nation, but the whole eSports industry. Rise Nation has officially become the first organization to step into the competitive Madden scene. “We wanted to do something different, something that no other organization has yet to even consider,” said Rise Nation’s co-owner Kahreem Horsley via Rise Nation’s FaceBook page.
Rise Nation used to primarily be a Call of Duty team. They also managed to put together a full roster for Overwatch when it came out earlier this year. Roger Saffold is the CEO and co-owner of Rise Nation. He is also a professional NFL player for the Los Angeles Rams. He came into the organization when one of his friends took him to a Call of Duty tournament. Roger is very excited about the future of eSports. It is easy to tell why he would like to sign a professional Madden player to the Rise Nation roster.
Madden 17 will be featuring the Madden Championship Series with a $1,000,000 prize pool. This type of money is going to get eSports organizations to pay attention to the Madden community. Rise Nation is probably not the last organization to dabble in competitive madden, but they are definitely the first.
EA Sports’ Madden 17 is set to release on August 23. It is coming out for the Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation 4.