2020 LCS Spring Split

Lore & Background

Sentinels entered the world of competitive Valorant in the summer of 2020, a period when the game had only just opened its beta to the public. The competitive landscape was still being written: there were no established leagues, no seasonal splits, and no 'Spring' or 'Summer' structure the way League of Legends had built its LCS calendar over a decade. The single defining tournament of that first year was Valorant Champions 2020, held in Berlin in the autumn. Sentinels walked into that event as one of the early top-tier rosters and walked out with the trophy, cementing their identity as a founding force in the game's competitive story.

The confusion with 'LCS' likely stems from the broader Riot Games ecosystem, where both titles share a publisher, a similar competitive branding vocabulary (splits, seasons, playoffs), and a shared fan community that follows multiple franchises. Forum posts, SEO-driven content farms, and auto-generated 'team history' pages have occasionally conflated the two, producing phantom entries like a 'Sentinels 2020 LCS Spring Split' that never existed. This wiki entry serves as a corrective: the real 2020 narrative for Sentinels is one of a brand-new game, a single marquee tournament, and a first championship that still anchors the organization's legacy.

In Their Own Story

The Berlin arena smelled of cold air conditioning and nervous energy. It was late October, and Valorant had been out for barely four months. On the stage, five Sentinels players sat behind their PCs, the monitors glowing with the tactical map of Ascent. The crowd—smaller than a League of Legends main-stage crowd, but electric in a way that felt raw and new—chanted in a language the players were still learning to read. There was no Spring Split to look back on, no three-season grind, no veteran rivalry. There was only this: one tournament, one chance to define what a 'champion' meant in a game that was still a baby. They won. The confetti was cheap, the trophy was new, and the feeling was something none of them had ever had before—being the first. Not the best. The first.

Reader's Guide

2020 (Summer–Autumn): Valorant opens its beta in June. The competitive scene is embryonic—no league structure, no splits. Sentinels, already assembled as a roster, begins competing in the handful of early invitational and open-qualifier events that Riot organizes to seed the competitive ladder.

October 2020 – Valorant Champions 2020, Berlin: The first and only major Valorant tournament of the year. Sentinels advance through the bracket and claim the championship. This is the event that fans sometimes mislabel with League of Legends terminology ('Spring Split,' 'season opener') because the game's competitive vocabulary was still being borrowed from LoL's established lexicon.

Post-2020: Riot formalizes the VCT (Valorant Champions Tour) structure for 2021, introducing regional leagues with actual Spring and Summer splits. From that point forward, 'Spring Split' becomes a real Valorant term—but it belongs to the 2021+ era, not to Sentinels' 2020 story. Any reference to a 'Sentinels 2020 LCS Spring Split' is a category error: wrong game, wrong league, wrong year.

Did You Know?

• Sentinels' 2020 championship came in the very first major Valorant tournament ever held, meaning they were, literally, the first team to be called 'Valorant Champions.'
• The term 'Spring Split' in a Valorant context did not exist until the VCT league structure launched in 2021; in 2020 there was no split system at all.
• LCS (League of Legends Championship Series) and Valorant's VCT are separate competitive products under the same publisher, which is the root of most cross-game naming confusion in fan wikis.
• Valorant's open beta launched in June 2020, meaning the entire 2020 competitive season spanned roughly four months—a far cry from the multi-split calendar fans of LoL are accustomed to.