The LCS has existed for nearly 2 years at this point, with 8 teams battling each other each split for the top spots. With only 8 teams per split, 5 players per team, and only being in our 4th split you'd think that there's not a lot of diversity in such a small sample size, even before remembering at maximum 3 teams can be knocked out of the league at a time. However you, like myself, will probably be presently surprised when you really sit down and realize how diverse the NA LCS has been.
In two years of play the NA LCS has managed to hit many of the major racial groups with at least 1 player of each Asian, White, Black, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Hispanic descent. We've had openly gay players. We've had starters still in high school, married men, and even a parent starting for an NA LCS team. Those players have been born from over a dozen different countries including USA, Canada, Venezuela, Bulgaria, Korea, Germany, Scotland, Denmark, Belgium, The Philippines, Armenia, Isreal, and China. That's a lot of different backgrounds for a league that only allows 40 players in at a time.
Despite how good that looks we can still do better. LCS is most obviously still missing a woman player. Women are painfully lacking in esports in general as well as League, despite prominent examples like Hafu and Scarlett continuing to prove they can compete. While I won't advocate picking up someone solely for diversity's sake I do hope we as a community can do more to encourage women and any other groups still not represented in the LCS to keep trying.
In the mean time we can all be just a little bit proud of how diverse the NA LCS has been in such a short time, and hopeful that it keeps expanding in the future.
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