NACE takes its Spring 2026 Grand Finals to Full Sail with six titles

North America's largest association of varsity esports programs has fixed the date and the place of its spring championship. The National Association of Collegiate Esports, known as NACE, will hold its Spring 2026 Grand Finals from April 23 to 26 at Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida, the university announced on February 17, 2026.

Forty-eight varsity teams from across North America will play for national titles in six games over four days. The event is presented by ASUS Republic of Gamers, and it will be the first time the official Overwatch Collegiate league is played on LAN, the term for matches played in person on a local network rather than online from each campus.

What NACE and Full Sail announced

The release sets out a four-day weekend at two venues on the Full Sail campus: the Full Sail University Orlando Health Fortress and the Full Sail Live venue. The 48 teams are described as the best varsity teams from across North America. In college esports, a varsity team is the official team a school fields under its own name, as opposed to a casual student club.

Six titles are on the program: League of Legends, Valorant, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, Overwatch, Rocket League and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Call of Duty moves to Black Ops 7, the edition named in the 2026 release, after the 2025 finals were played on Black Ops 6.

Riley Long, Executive Director of NACE, said the association was proud to team up with ASUS Republic of Gamers to present the event, and praised Full Sail University as its host partner. ASUS Republic of Gamers supplies the hardware. According to the release, players will compete on its high-performance gaming desktops and monitors. The weekend also includes fan activities and live commentary throughout. The release does not give prize amounts or scholarship figures for 2026.

Overwatch Collegiate comes to LAN

The newest element is Overwatch. The official Overwatch Collegiate league, which NACE runs in partnership with Activision Blizzard, makes its first appearance on LAN at Full Sail, where its best teams will meet in person.

Overwatch itself is not new to the event. Overwatch 2 was among the titles of the 2024 finals, and Illinois State University won it at the 2025 edition. What changes in 2026 is the competition behind it: the official collegiate league built with the game's publisher now sends its best teams to the stage.

Long said in the release that bringing Overwatch Collegiate to LAN through the association's partnership with Blizzard, to showcase both Varsity and Open competition, was an exciting addition to this year's Grand Finals. He also described the event as the pinnacle of varsity competition, and said it reinforced the importance of NACE's eligibility standards and its in-person play requirements.

Who NACE represents

NACE was founded in 2016. The release describes it as the largest and most established association of varsity esports programs in North America, with more than 150 member institutions and over 4,000 student-athletes. Its members are colleges and universities with varsity esports programs.

Its competition has been played under the NACE Starleague name. A Full Sail release of February 2024 said the Starleague was established with Playfly Esports in fall 2021. That same release described Playfly Esports, a Playfly Sports company, as the operator of what it called the world's largest collegiate esports league.

Eligibility standards decide which students may represent a school, and in-person play requirements set when matches must be played on site rather than online. The February 17 release does not set those rules out, but its executive director tied the Grand Finals directly to them.

The leadership of the association has also changed since 2024. In February 2024, Michael Brooks spoke for NACE as its executive director, and Sari Kitelyn was listed both as chairman of the NACE board and as Director of Esports at Full Sail University. In 2026, the association's voice is Riley Long, its executive director.

Three springs at Full Sail

The 2026 Grand Finals follow spring finals on the Full Sail campus in 2024 and 2025. The event has grown longer over those years, and the game list has changed with it.

The 2024 event was a two-day finals for the Spring 2024 season of the NACE Starleague, which had started on January 29, 2024. Fourteen teams from colleges and universities in the United States and Canada took part in those finals. Its seven titles were League of Legends, Rocket League, Overwatch 2, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike 2 and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, and it carried US$15,000 in scholarship funds for selected players. The release called the Orlando Health Fortress the largest collegiate esports arena in the country, and quoted Curtis Winger, Vice President of Operations at Playfly Esports, beside the NACE and Full Sail officials.

The 2025 edition doubled the length to four days, from April 24 to 27, at the same two venues. Full Sail reported after the event that Maryville University won three of the six games, Rocket League among them. Teams at that edition included West Virginia University, the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Mississippi. Illinois State University won Overwatch 2, St. Clair College won Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Stony Brook won Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Two Full Sail students each received a US$10,000 scholarship from NACE that year.

How the 2025 finals weekend was played

The Call of Duty bracket of 2025 shows how a title is decided over the weekend. St. Clair College, whose team entered as the first seed, reported that the top eight teams from the United States and Canada had competed across the six titles. Its Call of Duty team first went through group play, a stage in which a small pool of teams meet one another before the knockout rounds, winning 3-0 against Texas A&M International and against Conestoga College.

The knockout rounds followed. St. Clair beat the University of Akron 3-0 in the semifinals, then swept Cumberland University, the second seed, 4-0 in the final on April 27, 2025, the last day of the event. The college said it was the team's second straight NACE Spring North American Championship.

The weekend around the matches was built for a crowd as much as for the players. Full Sail's account of the 2025 edition describes qualifying matches and sportscasting throughout the four days, and a block party with activities, booths and food trucks outside the venues.

The event as a classroom

For Full Sail, the Grand Finals are also a teaching event. Students from Full Sail and from NACE member programs take part in planning, operations and production, which the release presents as hands-on learning. At the 2025 finals, students from the university's Film, Show Production and Game Business and Esports programs worked on staging, production, sportscasting and content creation, according to the university.

Sari Kitelyn, Director of Esports at Full Sail University, welcomed the return in a single line: "We're honored to welcome the NACE Grand Finals back to Full Sail University." In 2025, after the previous edition, she had described the partnership as built on growing collegiate esports in an intentional, inclusive and sustainable way. For 2026 she added that the championship is both the highest level of collegiate competition and a hands-on learning experience, with students in production, esports management, live events and creative teams working alongside live event professionals. That combination of elite competition and experiential education, paired with professional guidance, is what makes the partnership meaningful, she said.

Full Sail was founded in 1979. The release says it was named a 2025 Top Game Design School by The Princeton Review and counts more than 100,000 graduates worldwide; it was also featured in MovieMaker's 2025 list of the 30 best film schools in the United States and Canada. Two years earlier, the 2024 release cited a 2022-2023 School of the Year title from the Florida Association of Postsecondary Schools and Colleges.

A national final on a campus is also a working studio: the students on stage and the students behind the cameras share the same weekend.

What comes next

The release does not say how teams earn their places in Florida. It speaks of the best 48 varsity teams from across North America and names the top eight Varsity and top two Open teams for Overwatch, ten teams in all for that title. It does not list the qualified schools for any of the six titles.

The Grand Finals open on Thursday, April 23, and close on Sunday, April 26, 2026, with national titles and trophies at stake in each of the six games. ASUS Republic of Gamers will present the event and equip the stage, and Full Sail students will once again help run it, in the third spring in a row that the association's championship comes to the same campus.

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