Blog

eSports coaching pioneers are making this up as they go

This is Part 4 of our five-part series on League of Legends and the future of eSports. Read the entire series here.

NEW YORK CITY — Neil “PR0LLY” Hammad, the head coach of H2K, a professional video game team that competes in the League of Legends Championship Series (LCS), was nervous. His team was currently watching the first semifinal match of the World Championship being played between Rox Tigers and SK Telecom T1 on Friday night in Madison Square Garden. The following night, his team would take on Samsung Galaxy in the second semifinal, and while Hammad liked his team’s chances, he was still feeling tense.

Would his team play to its ability? Would they stay focused on the match ahead and not look forward to the Finals, held the following weekend at Staples Center in Los Angeles? Would they be able to tune out the thousands of people packing the arena inside Madison Square Garden the following evening?

And now, with all this racing around his head, the strategies and lineups and team chemistry concerns that fill the minds of every pro coach, no matter what the sport, he had to give an interview.

How could you talk to press at a time like this?

Hammad is thin, with sharp features that make him look like a younger Steve Buscemi. He was dressed down for his team’s off night, wearing a rumpled hoodie over a blue rugby shirt that appeared to be missing a button. He’s clearly whip smart — he studied applied mathematics in school — and was extremely gracious with his time, even the night before a huge match. Down in the depths of Madison Square Garden in a small room set up for media interviews, he expounded on his fears, his work to become a better coach, and how coaching has, in just a year and a half, gone from being a strange anomaly to an expected part of the rapid growth of top level League of Legends teams.

But there is a price to pay for the services. cialis cheap generic This disease is not anything different and can be cured with herbal pill viagra for sale remedies. Two tadalafil canada men, one woman and the other people who are creating content. Where to buy Kamagra jelly? Men who are sildenafil india wholesale facing such problems, no. of doctors who offer related treatment has increased as well.
Coaches to League of Legends are very new. While they had been around for a few years, Riot Games — the creator of League of Legends and company that runs the League of Legends Championship Series — only began inviting team coaches on stage starting in January 2015, promoting them from behind-the-scenes influences to main characters in the drama. Coaches could not talk to players during the game — communication was limited to active players — but they could dictate strategy, choose when to bring in a substitute, and speak to players between games in the best-of-five series.

So coaches were now unavoidably a part of the game. There was only one problem: No one had any idea how to coach.

“For the first 2015 split,” said Hammad, referring to the first season when coaches could be on stage, “ex-players just sort of jumped into coaching roles. A whole bunch of things happened. There really wasn’t a defined skillset. [All of the teams] were just like, ‘Well, uh, hire someone who knows about the game.’ Which is how I got hired. I just knew a lot about the game.”

Hammad wasn’t even really interested in becoming a coach. He was still in his relative playing prime, had just been knocked out of LCS, and was looking to hop on with a new team as a player. But he wasn’t having any luck, so when a message popped up on Skype offering him the chance to coach a Challenger team (a lower division squad), he figured what the hell. The team would have a chance to compete for promotion to the full LCS in a couple months, and he’d try to guide them to up to the big leagues. Then he’d get back to playing.

He succeeded. It helped that his team, H2K, was loaded with talent, players he said were better than any he’d ever played with before. They won promotion to LCS easily, and it so happened at that moment Riot Games changed their policy and invited coaches on stage. With no good offers for a team coming, Hammad once again said what the hell.

“The coaching role fit me. I was kind of a coach on my team, when I was a player. But it’s hard for one player to have authority over others. When I was a player, I couldn’t really go into the coaching role, because there’s a lot of back and forth. If I made a mistake that game, I can’t really call someone out on their mistake, because they’ll have something to fire back.”

Hammad found himself in a new role of authority, in a suddenly respected position as team coach. The problem was he still really had no idea what he was doing — no one did. He’d had coaches before, and all of them were terrible.

“I didn’t have an idol. I had anti-idols,” he said.

Not only had he not really had any good coaches in League before, he never really had a coach before in anything before, eschewing traditional sports growing up. So he wasn’t really sure what a coach was supposed to do. And it’s not like his players all grew up on team sports, so they were new to the thing as well.

Over the last year, they’ve been slowly working that all out.

“On the outside it seems obvious,” Hammad said. “You need the coach to be an authoritative figure. But in the scene, you know, we’re all the same age. We’ve all got about the same experience. So it’s really weird to give authority to a guy who’s the same age as you, younger than you, and they’re telling you what to do.”

What happened then was a trial-and-error period where Hammad taught himself how to be a coach of something. Using reverse-engineering methods that he learned in his mathematics studies, Hammad figured out that it was more effective for him to be positive during team talks as opposed to harping on mistakes. He also remembered how he had hated coaches who took credit for success, so he decided to eliminate that from his oeuvre.

“I actually learned that from mis-coaching in the past,” Hammad said. “I had coaches who would take all the praise on themselves when we’d win, so I experienced that firsthand as a player, like, why is this guy loving himself so much? I took the complete opposite approach. I felt terrible when my coach was doing this, so I decided never to do that.”

When I mentioned the old coaching cliche “players win games and coaches lose them,” he smiled blankly. He hadn’t heard it before.

He’d also come upon an idea that he now takes very seriously — that players should focus only on one game at a time.

“I remember there was a multi-game series recently, and my guys I could see their heads were just starting to wander, looking ahead, and I kept saying, ‘Just one more game, guys. Just one more game.’ And I said this all four games.

“So yeah, now I’m always talking about ‘one game at a time.’ I think it’s super cheesy, right?” he asked. “Like it’s something they’d say in Mighty Ducks.”

While some well-known coaching techniques are proving effective, Hammad also pointed out that he has to deal with things that no ordinary pro sports coach does.

“This isn’t an 8-hour job where you go home at the end of the day,” said Hammad. “You live with these people. The game is extremely trust-dependent. The team has to believe in each other. In a game where there are so many mistakes all the time, so many things going wrong, you can lose respect for your teammate really easily.”

He went on: “So part of the job as a coach is to keep morale up, the respect between the players up, you know, the respect between you and the players really high. That’s something I’ve never had to deal with before.”

Hammad is still learning. The next night, his overmatched H2K would be swept by the Samsung team, losing out on a chance for a final. But the experience is one that Hammad will file away. He will learn from it. He will improve. There’s so much room for improvement.

“I’m still not 100% sure exactly what I’m doing in every role as head coach,” he admitted, near the end of our interview.

When I pointed out that coaches were only allowed onstage a year ago, and he should be easy on himself as this was all pretty new, Hammad shook his head vigorously that it was no excuse.

“I’m in my second season,” he said.

Source: For The Win