Game developer Riot Games has announced that it will host its first-ever College VALORANT Season (CVAL) during 2022-23.
The season will consist of three tournaments across four server regions (North, South, East and West) in North America and will be open to school-based teams in the US and Canada.
According to the release, there will be three tournaments over the course of Autumn, Winter, and Spring. These events will culminate in a singular College VALORANT Championship event, with the final rounds to be held live in Los Angeles around May or June 2023.
Schools are free to participate on whichever server works best for them, but can only earn credit towards the CVAL Championship in one region. Riot will award scholarship prizes at all three season tournaments, as well as the Championship event.
In addition to the season announcement, Riot also made a call for third-party tournament administrators to work together and bring the CVAL competition to life.
The game developer explained that each administrator will be responsible for one or more regional tournaments, but the season will operate through a single central Discord server.
All the events will also run through a central tournament platform provider. More details about how the season will work — including rules and eligibility — will be released in August.
Riot’s College League of Legends (CLOL), its collegiate league for League of Legends, has experienced continued growth having just concluded its fifth year of operation, according to Riot.
The league first launched in North America in 2018 under the CLOL branding, though it was the fourth year of collegiate LoL events overall.
Earlier this year, the game developer announced changes to its scholastic and collegiate LoL ecosystem, moving to a ‘non-exclusive high school model’ which allows all tournament organisers to host scholastic competitions across North America.
Riot is now focusing on creating and advancing a structure for VALORANT through CVAL, given that it’s a vastly different game from LoL. It remains to be seen if the changes to Riot’s collegiate LoL events will be replicated in its VALORANT counterpart.
