How important is having pervious work experience before my first coop? [Comp Sci]

I'm international and where I grew up, there were practically no opportunities for work experience or internships. I'm not in the country for summer either so I can't get an internship now, but I'm going to focus a lot on side projects and certifications. I feel out of place as everyone ik has past internships or at least smaller stuff like hackathons and competitions on their resume, whereas I wasn't even able to take a computer science course in high school. Am I at a big disadvantage?

Edit: Forgot to add, I'm cs+bba laurier side, so I don't get access to the uw coop system and I need to apply externally.