The Boston Uprising has always been a good Overwatch team. Owned by the Kraft Group, which owns the New England Patriots and other New England traditional sports teams, they were highly doubted with APEX and Contenders: Season 0 players like DPS Nam-joo “Striker” Kwon (Rox Orcas), Off Tank Lucas “NotE” Meissner (Toronto Esports) and Main Tank Young-jin “Gamsu” Noh (ConBox) from multiple different teams filling their roster. The staff wasn’t considered much better with Chris “HuK” Loranger leading the charge, a former Starcraft II player. Despite this, they were able to make their way to the Overwatch League (OWL) finals of Stage 3 in the 2018 inaugural season, being the first team to complete a perfect stage (1#, 10-0) due to the prevalence of the Dive in the meta (Winston, D.Va, Genji, Doomfist and Tracer with any support characters). After losing only to the New York Excelsior (#2, 9-1) in the finals of the stage. They ended that season in third place overall (26-14) with a playoff quarter-final finish, losing to the overall sixth place team, the Philadelphia Fusion (24-16). The Fusion would move on to lose in the finals to the London Spitfire. This was the high point of the Uprising as the following year’s season was not nearly as kind to them. It started out promising, The Uprising with the help of new Main Tank Cameron “Fusions” Bosworth, who had an impressive performance at that year’s Overwatch World Cup with the United Kingdom team (4th overall), and Support Minseok “AimGod” Kwon made it to the 2019 season Stage 1 playoffs (#6, 4-3). After being beaten in the quarter finals by the Vancouver Titans, who had just come off of a perfect stage (7-0) and went on to win the title match against San Francisco Shock (6#, 4-3). 

 This is where the slump began for the Uprising, as the 2019 season left them in 19th place overall out of 20 teams, with only 8 wins (#19, 8-20) and only the Florida Mayhem below them (#20, 6-22).  This can be contributed to a multitude of reasons. Losing the teams head coach Dae-hee “Crusty” Park, and what many considered one of the best Tracer players in the world, Striker to the San Fransico Shock who went on to win the season playoff final (2# overall, 23-5, Pacific). The meta changing to favor GOATS (Three Tank, Three Support, with a Sombra variant) which the Uprising was notoriously bad at. This downward trend would continue in the 2020 season, where even with the GOATS meta being diluted with banned heroes and role lock, with the signing of a talented Support Sang-min “Myunb0ng” Seo, the Uprising would not make a playoff appearance ending at 20th overall (2-19).

Despite this, the slump looks to be slowing for the 2021 Overwatch Leauge season for the Boston Uprising. The new signing of DPS Terence “SoOn” Tarlier, Jin-ui “im37” Hong and Byeong-ju “Valentine” Kim’s gave the Boston Uprising a new leash on life at the Steelseries Invitational Tournament, where the Uprising (1-1) came in second overall, beating the Paris Eternal (4#, 0-1) and losing to the Los Angeles Gladiators (1#, 2-0). In the previous 2020 season, the Paris Eternal was 4th overall (4#, 19-6, North America). Will this upward trend continue? Maybe. It’s hard to tell due to the release of SoOn due to visa issues, and how integral he was to Boston’s performance in the tournament. IBM Watson predicted the Boston Uprising as 20th for the next year. But this performance does give some hope for their Week 2 debut on April 24th, 2021 in a rematch against the Gladiators.