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The 2026 season of College League of Legends and College Valorant, the official intercollegiate competition Riot Games runs for North American universities, is under way with more than 4,000 students taking part. UNIVERSITY Esports NA, the operator of the two leagues, set out the season in an announcement published on February 5, 2026 by GGTech Entertainment, the company behind that platform.
The two programs are known as CLOL and CVAL. GGTech counts 600 teams from 300 schools in the United States and Canada, split into regional and partner conferences, with a road that runs from a regular season in winter to a College Championship in late spring. Registration has closed, and the regular season opened on January 24.
UNIVERSITY Esports NA season announcement, published by GGTech Entertainment on February 5, 2026.
What the operator announced
The February 5 announcement is a season guide more than a news release: it describes the structure, the calendar and the formats that will decide the next intercollegiate champions in both games. GGTech described the 2026 competition as Riot Games' official intercollegiate esports competition in North America, operated by UNIVERSITY Esports NA, and said it runs from late January to early June.
The operator tied the size of this year's field to the success of its Fall Warm-Up tournaments, the preseason events that came before the season. It counted more than 4,000 participants from the United States and Canada once registration closed.
Two games share the same frame. College League of Legends is played in Riot's five-against-five battle arena game, in which two teams try to destroy each other's base. College Valorant uses Riot's tactical shooter, in which an attacking side tries to plant a bomb that the defending side must stop or defuse. The two leagues are separate competitions with their own champions, but they follow one calendar and one set of stages.
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The program belongs to Riot Games through the Riot Scholastic Association of America, known as the RSAA, which oversees Riot's school and college play in North America. Since the 2023-24 school year, the day-to-day running has been handed to GGTech Entertainment, the company behind the UNIVERSITY Esports project.
Riot announced that arrangement on July 18, 2023. J.T. Vandenbree, Head of the RSAA, wrote then that GGTech would become the official provider of the North American collegiate program for three years, starting with the 2023-24 school year. The scope covered College League of Legends, College Valorant, the college club program and additional events such as the College League of Legends Fall Warmup. Riot described GGTech as an eight-year partner that already supported college esports in EMEA, the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, and in Latin America.
The same announcement said the RSAA would stay closely involved in the operations, strategy and direction of the college ecosystem, and that GGTech would seek partners and sponsors on the RSAA's behalf. Josh Williams, Global Director of UNIVERSITY Esports at GGTech Entertainment, was named as the company's lead on the project. College Valorant was still young at the time: Riot noted that the game's college league had completed one successful first season before the handover. Counted from 2023-24, the 2026 season falls in the 2025-26 school year, the third of the three years Riot announced.
GGTech gave a sense of its own size in November 2023, when it said UNIVERSITY Esports was present in 26 countries on four continents, with more than 100,000 students from over 2,000 universities. From the 2023-24 season, it added, UNIVERSITY Esports NA would run the official RSAA college competitions and also act as the RSAA's broadcast partner.
Related readNACE takes its Spring 2026 Grand Finals to Full Sail with six titlesHow the 2026 season is built
The conference map itself is not new. When GGTech opened registration for the 2024 College League of Legends season in November 2023, it described the same four regional conferences as the structure already used in 2023, with partner athletic conferences beside them and 32 teams reaching a live finals event at the end.
The operator divides its 600 teams into conferences, the same word American college sport uses for its leagues of schools. There are four regional conferences, named North, East, South and West, and seven partner conferences. The announcement does not name the partner conferences. GGTech has described teams from partner athletic conferences as playing their own regular-season tournaments inside the Riot program.
The season then moves through four phases, each with its own format.
| Phase | Dates | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Regular season | January 24 to February 22 | Five weeks in a Swiss format |
| Conference Playoffs | February 23 to April 12 | Championship and Open Divisions |
| Open Divisional Playoffs | April to May | 16 teams, single elimination |
| College Championship | From April 18, final dates to be set | Top 32 teams, double elimination |
UNIVERSITY Esports NA, February 5, 2026. The College Championship ends in late May or early June.
The regular season uses a Swiss format, a system in which teams are paired each round with opponents on the same record, so that winning teams meet winning teams and nobody is knocked out early. According to the operator, those five weeks decide the 32 teams that advance to the Conference Playoffs.
Championship Division and Open Division
From the playoffs, the field splits in two. The Championship Division, the top tier, is played as a 32-team modified double-elimination bracket. In double elimination a team must lose twice before it is out: a first defeat sends it to a lower bracket, where it can still fight its way back toward the final.
The Open Division is built for the wider field. It runs as a seven-week single-elimination bracket, in which one defeat ends a team's season. Teams that hold automatic qualification bids, places earned through their results, feed into the Open Divisional Playoffs, which the operator schedules from April to May with 16 teams in a single-elimination bracket.
Related readWarwick named NSE Esports University of the Year for an eighth timeA Selection Committee closes the gaps between the two tiers. The committee identifies the teams that did not qualify automatically, completes the Open Division field and finalizes the seeding of the brackets. The announcement does not say who sits on the committee.
CLOL and CVAL crown separate champions
College League of Legends and College Valorant share a calendar, a conference map and the same stages. Each game still has its own field, its own brackets and its own national champion at the end of the season.
From conference playoffs to a national title
The College Championship is the last stage. The top teams from the Conference Playoffs advance to it directly. The operator describes it as a double-elimination bracket of the top 32 North American teams, starting on April 18 and running to late May or early June. The exact dates of the final rounds are listed as to be determined.
The 2025 edition shows how the end of the road has been staged. In March 2025, GGTech announced that North Carolina State University in Raleigh would host the 2025 College Championship Grand Finals, in collaboration with Visit Raleigh. College League of Legends crowned its champion there on May 31, 2025, and College Valorant on June 1. That announcement explained that the top two teams of each game reach the Grand Finals and play in person, after a bracket that starts in mid-April.
The 2025 announcement also named the partners of that season: Visit Raleigh, ExitLag, Riot Games and GGTech Entertainment. Caio Almeida, Senior Manager at Riot Games, and Cody Elsen, Esports Director at NC State University, were among the officials quoted at the time, with Williams speaking for GGTech. No host for the 2026 Grand Finals has been announced in the February 5 guide.
Scholarships and the growth of the field
Prizes in Riot's college program take the form of scholarships rather than cash for players. When it presented the 2024 College League of Legends season in November 2023, GGTech said scholarship prizes would go to the players and student staff of the top 16 schools of the College Championship. Riot's July 2023 announcement had promised equal scholarship prizes to previous seasons for both games, along with the same dates, formats and live finals. Neither page gives an amount, and the 2026 season guide does not list prizes.
The size of the field gives the clearest measure of how the program has grown under the current operator. In October 2023, the College League of Legends Fall Warmup, a preseason tournament, drew more than 1,700 students on 250 teams from 172 schools, according to GGTech. That tournament was played in one game only. The 2026 season counts more than 4,000 students on 600 teams from 300 schools across both games, a different competition with a wider field.
The Fall Warmup of 2023 also produced the operator's first broadcast. Its Shurima Division final, broadcast on October 29, 2023, was won by University of Waterloo Gold, from the University of Waterloo in Canada, against Spartan Esports of San Jose State University.
What comes next
The regular season runs until February 22, so the remaining Swiss rounds will set the playoff fields over the next ten days. The Conference Playoffs follow from February 23 to April 12, and the College Championship opens on April 18. Open Division teams play their divisional playoffs between April and May.
The operator has said the champions will be crowned in late May or early June, with the dates of the final rounds still to be set. The 2026 guide sets the calendar but names no host city yet for the final rounds.
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