High School Starleague owes my team $5000 in Scholarship money, need help : DotA2

**UPDATE 2: We've opened up a line of communication with head of HSL. We're fairly confident that we should be getting paid in the coming weeks. We'll be sure to take action if it falls through however.

Thanks for all the support r/dota2!!**

**UPDATE: We'd like to thank NSEF, National Scholastic Esports Foundation for offering to pay $5k in scholarship money if HSL doesn't pay out! They seem like a great organization and we cannot thank them enough.

Additionally, we may be looking to take action in the small claims court**

I’m not sure what I can do at this point so I thought I’d try reddit.

I’m the coordinator of a (former) Highschool Dota team, Scarsdale High School. For the past three years, we played in a league called High School Starleague, which hosts national interscholastic tournaments for the most popular eSports. To provide an incentive for players, they promised scholarship money to high placing participants. You can read more about it here. (http://hsstarleague.com/)

Our team won the 2014-2015 season and the 2015-2016 season , so the team is owed $5000. At the time of winning, HSL informed us that they would send the money to our respective schools at the time of graduation.

All of the team members graduated in 2017, so I started making efforts to reach out to HSL for the money. I messaged the FB page, emailed them, and even tried to DM the admin in charge of paying prize money. Unfortunately, they completely ignored my messages, which I know for a fact because another player contacted them for a related issue (though they aren’t owed money) and they got a relatively fast response. They’ve updated their website as well, so it’s very hard to find evidence that the scholarship even existed, which they might have done on purpose although we don't know that for sure (all necessary evidence is at the bottom of the post)

We just graduated High School, and while the money doesn’t seem like much, paying for college is a disaster in this country. The team really needs this money, and I’m sure there are other prize money winners (like those who finished in 2nd and 3rd place) who also haven’t been paid.

All necessary evidence is here (evidence we won, prizing confirmations etc.) Evidence Hopefully reddit could help us, or advise on what actions to take.