Our team facilitates competition and broadcasts matches for more than 18,000 students from nearly 800 colleges and universities across 15 titles, with an outstanding $280,000 in scholarship prize pooling as of the 2023-2024 academic year.

Since Fall 2022, NACE Starleague has begun operating a multi-tiered collegiate league system that runs throughout the each academic year. For more information please read all available information below.

All competition is subsequently broken down into two Tiers, with multiple Divisions allocated to each. Only NACE Member schools are eligible to compete in the Varsity Division (the highest level of offered competitive play). All schools regardless of status are eligible to compete via the Open Division. 

Registered teams in each Tier are divided into multiple Divisions based first and foremost on their skill level. Premier Divisions feature two or more consecutive tournaments, last-chance qualifiers (LCQs) and overall playoffs.  

Plus Divisions will feature a single playoffs tournament for top qualifying teams only. The strongest Division of each respective Tier will be further split based on regional Conferences (i.e East or West) with the limitation that schools may only field one team.*

*Game titles and schedules are subject to change at the discretion of publishers. Any changes to available game titles and/or schedules will be announced on or before September 1, 2023.

Varsity Eligibility

In order to participate in the Varsity division, schools must be registered as NACE Members (either Full or Associate Members); however, we do not want to limit a school’s ability to participate in meaningful and rewarding organized competition, so there will always be equal prizing offered at the highest levels of play in both Varsity and Open competitions.

Prizing Distribution

Although the eligibility requirements for Varsity play changed last season, we are wholly committed to ensuring that access to scholarship prizes and highly-skilled competition remains open to all schools, regardless of their program’s status. We have endeavored to make scholarship prizing more accessible and will be offering equal prize pools for all applicable titles in both tiers of competition – Varsity and Open.

Last-chance Qualifier (Premier Divisions only)

Rather than automatically take on the top two teams from each conference, only the 1st place team will receive an automatic bid into the Playoffs. The 2nd and 3rd place teams will be entered into a Last-chance Qualifier, where they’ll fight to earn one of the final Playoffs spots against similarly placed teams from other conferences.