The USAEL Open is an open-to-everyone esports league for high school, middle school and elementary school students with $5,000+ in seasonal prizing. Whether you’re a veteran team or brand new to esports, we invite you to experience what makes us the best.
We pride ourselves on being the most accessible esports league. These are our promises to our teachers, coaches, parents, and students.
* Grade tags show who can play: ES, MS, HS. Combinations (like ES/MS/HS) mean those levels compete together.
Registration Open
League Week 1
League Week 2
League Week 3
League Week 4
League Week 5
League Week 6
Thanksgiving Break
League Week 7
Playoffs Week 1
Playoffs Week 2
Make an account on the platform! All you need is a name and email address.
Join your school community! If it doesn’t exist, make one with your school’s name.
Join one (or all) of our leagues! If you need a team, you can add other students from your school community.
Send us your available play times and wait for our admins to send you a match!
The USAEL offers a wide range of award-winning esports and STEM courses that are designed to make learning fun. If you’re a parent or educator that’s interested in a more balanced esports experience for your students, we’ll send you a free course demo and lesson plan when you sign a team up for the USAEL Open.
The USAEL Open is hosted on a best-in-class tournament platform that was custom built for security, with compliance that meets the highest bars of nation’s largest school districts to on-platform match chat that eliminates the need for third-party platforms like Discord. Our platform is trusted and used by clients like the US Air Force and NFL Play Football.
Yes! We know it’s probably your first time using the platform, so we made a guide to walk you through all the steps. You can view it (and our other guides) here.
If you’re a student, don’t worry — you can just compete. For teachers and parents — we pride ourselves on bringing a balanced approach to esports in the classroom, and we have an award-winning curriculum library to back it up. Normally, we reserve our courses for our paying USAEL customers, but if you have students that want to compete in the USAEL Open, we thought it’d be helpful to include a course demo so you can try out a cohesive curriculum and competition experience.
We’ll send out an email with access information to your curriculum demo before the first week of competition. Just make sure that you’ve created an account, joined a school community, and have your role set to Parent or Teacher.
Our games cover a huge range of gaming devices, from Nintendo Switches to PC and mobile. After you register, you’ll be able to view the Competition List, which will have details on the specific device requirements for each game.
There’s no catch! In the past, we only hosted leagues for our official USAEL network, but we heard feedback that our schools wanted a wider variety of competitors to play against. The USAEL Open is our way of fulfilling that promise, while also introducing more students, parents, and teachers to the benefits of academic esports.
Don’t worry, we hear that all the time. We have a secure in-platform match chat that eliminates the need for Discord, and we have an IT Requirements Guide with precise whitelisting requirements that you can hand to your IT department. If that doesn’t work, schedule a call with us and we’re happy to help talk to your administration or IT department directly.
That won’t be an issue. We pride ourselves on being the most beginner-friendly league, so our tournament admins will hand-schedule all weekly matches based on your availability. All you have to do is fill out a schedule form after your register your team for any competition, and we’ll take care of the rest!
Yes! Many of our teams will be from official esports programs, but if you’re a student or group of students that want to just play for fun, you’re more than welcome to do so. Just keep in mind that if you’re under the age of 13, you’ll have to have a parent, guardian, or teacher handle account creation and registration for you.