Refined over three years of competitive seasons, the CCL aims to be the prime example of competitive gaming for a collegiate player-base.
Our mission is simple: provide an exemplary competitive experience for college students through our games, our engagement with the players, and through our pursuit of professional-grade services and support.
Keeping gaming smooth, competitive, and easily accessible is step one. We are thorough in our match recording and broadcasting schedules to maintain constant communication and relationship building with competing teams. This helps us not only keep players growing and coming back, but helping develop schools' programs along the way.
This relationship with our players builds trust, friendships, and opportunities for students looking to get their feet wet in industry-reflective positions within the league. These positions feature extensive support and collaboration in design, programming, event management and facilitation, and more. We aim to support these students' growth and look to facilitate them creating amazing things.
With all this going on, we want to nurture an inclusive and extraordinary program around a game that brought so many together. The vision of the CCL is to keep going strong and keep building a place where sound competition meets exemplary talent, both in the competition, and behind the scenes.
One of our goals working alongside eFuse and CCA is to standardize what it means to have a Varsity program at a school, and how that status impacts participation in collegiate leagues. Upon being approved, Varsity teams will receive non-competitive benefits for their team and their school. Our goal is to work with Varsity teams to provide benefits that make their logistics, broadcast, and content easier and better than ever before because of their investment in their teams, their students, and in our league. This Varsity status will not impact the competitive format as Varsity schools will continue to compete in Main and Academy alongside club teams.
Season 1 of the College CoD League would take place during the first half of 2019. Taking place from January through April, teams from across the United States and Canada would battle it out for dominance in-game and school pride out of game. The season consisted of 23 regular season matches with teams divided into 4 different regions.
Throughout the season, the CCL introduced Fight Night; an opportunity for teams to challenge one another in a friendly best of 5 match-up to determine who the better team was. Several Fight Nights were played throughout the season, all with their own flair and rivalry to match the intensity. The very first Fight Night included renowned Call of Duty caster Benson as a special guest to commemorate the start of the new event.
The season culminated in a playoffs featuring the top 16 teams from the league. The first 12 spots were filled by top 3 teams from each region. The remaining 4 teams were decided based on double elimination bracket play-in featuring the 4th and 5th seeds from each of the four divisions. After a crazy bracket full of close match-ups and intense rivalry, Humber College took home the victory after eliminating Ole Miss Esports in the grand finals in a 3-2 map count.
The beginnings of the CCL started in the early parts of 2018. CoD lacked collegiate esports representation. Several different individuals from different universities across North America took it upon themselves to make it a reality. One of these said individuals was a student from Ole Miss; Sergio 'Physix' Brack.
"It really started with wanting to be respected and wanting representation of Call of Duty esports in the collegiate esports realm. I found this amazing community of competitors at my school during my freshman year and was laughed at for asking if we had a Call of Duty team. From that day, I vowed to change that. I started by looking to Twitter and could not find a community of people strong enough to get things done. I then went to Reddit. The amazing thing is that the post you're reading was my first Reddit post of all-time! That's how desperate and driven I was to make something like the CCL. Most people would say they never thought it would be where it is today but not me. Now the same people that laughed at me, give the utmost respect when their Call of Duty teams walks in to the room. That is what this league was made for."
The season began in late July with 8 different teams. These teams were mostly comprised of pick up teams of various players who attend a college. This season ran until mid September where we crowned Georgia Southern University, consisting of: Jokez, Vizual, Apoc, and Nevermind, as the champions of season 0.