In the past I’ve written about broad issues facing eSports: scheduling, the Counter-Strike: Source vs. Counter-Strike 1.6 debate, and competitive maps. Today I want to focus more on an issue that faces every team individually. Is it time for teams to get coaches?
Right now there’s a small amount of coaching going on, but only in the form of lessons given by professional players. Most of those lessons are about very basic skills: using angles, flashes, and controlling recoil. In other words, things you already know if you’re playing in CEVO-P or CAL-I. But there isn’t any person or system in place to teach professional teams. From a coaching perspective, eSports is on the level of a YMCA basketball team that tries too hard – there are five players, and one of them calls plays. Even having a player-coach would be a step up, and the last time one of those was in professional sports all the crazy fads in “That 70’s Show” were actual fads. There’s no person or system in place for professional players to get better or have a consistent outside opinion on their play.
As far as I know, there have only been two attempts at having the coach be a separate position within an organization (he’s not also a player or manager). Both of these were from Team 3D. Their first attempt was an ill-fated hiring of Chris “Bootman” Boutte, a Counter-Strike analyst that did a lot of work for GotFrag. After trying it out the team didn’t feel like it was helping, and he wasn’t meshing well with them ingame or with their personalities. They’re trying again with Dave “moto” Geffon, a longtime 3D member. He isn’t playing anymore and is officially listed as their coach, but I’m not sure what he’s actually doing. That is, I’m not sure if he’s just helping devise strats, if he’s reviewing their match demos and specing the match, or if it’s an honorary title like King of Town. Outside of Moto, the only things teams have are strat-callers. The extent of their coaching duties ends at calling the play. They don’t spend their time helping other players become better. (And believe me, there are ways to get better. The perfect Counter-Strike player would know where every opponent was and never miss a shot. It’s the ideal player, just like the ideal batter hits 1.000 and the ideal passer completes every pass for a touchdown. Of course all three are practically impossible – unless you’re a member of myg0t.) I don’t blame them, though. I know I wouldn’t want to spend an extra four hours a night looking at the demos from my teammates.
I understand that a lot of people think you should be able to get better by yourself – any player worth his weight in Mountain Dew could figure out what’s going wrong and fix it. I’m not going to dispute that, because I think that given enough time any player could figure out what’s wrong. The key phrase is “enough time”. Having a coach look at team demos would be much more efficient. Players already have to play, and some of these teams are scrimming four or five times a night. Imagine if, as a player, not only did you have to play for five hours, but you had to spend another five hours reviewing all your scrim demos to figure out exactly what went wrong and why. That’s ten hours a day of Counter-Strike; enough to drive a man to Solitaire. Of course, you’d have to review your teammates’ demos, as well. No man is an island, and sometimes a player dies simply because a teammate made an error. If you want to find the true cause of everything that went wrong, you’d have to watch a round from every important angle, and there’s so much going on it would probably take seeing it from three or four perspectives.
Even from an organizational standpoint, the current setup has flaws. Running a team is hard, and having the manager take on some of the coaching duties is asking too much. If the manager gets attached to the personnel, it’s easy to give a player too much leeway even though he’s clearly not up to snuff. Right now, most managers travel, encourage, and interact with the team. Basically, the manager is friends with most or all of the players. This isn’t a bad thing by itself, but it can be a problem when the manager has to make roster decisions. Even if you know a player hasn’t been playing well and is over the hill, it’s hard to drop him when all you can think about is how important he was to the organization and to yourself. You’ve heard the phrase before, especially in the NFL, but on some levels it’s a business. Personal feelings usually don’t lead to good business decisions.
If there was a separate person as a coach, it’d ease the burden on everybody. For an organization, having the same person as a coach and a manager has been tried before with limited success. The biggest example I can think of is Mike Holmgren. He was a renowned coach with the Green Bay Packers but left them to become the coach and general manager of the Seattle Seahawks in 1999. He relinquished his GM duties in 2002, and in the four years he held both positions the team was 9-7, 6-10, 9-7, and 7-9 with zero playoff appearances. In the four years he’s only been coaching, 9-7 was their worst record, they made the playoffs all four years, and in 2005 they had a 13-3 record and a Super Bowl appearance. Separating the two jobs allows an extra degree of separation between players and management, which in turn makes roster decisions less personal. There have been plenty of bad contracts handed out in professional sports, but I can’t think of any that were done because a team felt loyalty to a player. If you need an example, look at Bernie Williams of the Yankees. He’d given them years of excellent play, but they only offered him a minor-league contract in the offseason because that’s what was best for the organization. On the other hand, I think eSports teams tend to hold onto players for too long out of loyalty. The most recent example is Sunman. He’d been in a slump long before he was released from coL, and there just isn’t any evidence to the contrary. He was playing poorly, why didn’t they replace him sooner? Considering he made the coL house and he brought in zet from Sweden, I don’t think Jason Lake is hesitant to take chances or change things up.
As for the players, I briefly mentioned player-coaches earlier, but given the problems it’s clear they’re not the answer. There’s a reason there haven’t been any player-coaches in professional sports the last three decades: they’d fall into the same pitfalls of time management and it’s impossible for one person to know everything that’s going on ingame while playing. At least a player-coach in basketball or baseball can see all the action on the field at all times. In Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, or any kind of team video game, your vision is extremely limited. Was a teammate picked because of a stupid push, a missed shot, or because the other team made a ridiculous shot. Each problem has a different solution: push less, work on your aim, or just chalk that ridiculous shot up to luck and try again. A player-coach would either have to find that out from the player or from watching the demo, but both would be after the contest. And, as mentioned earlier, sometimes a player dies because somebody else made a mistake. That means a LOT of demo reviewing to find out exactly what went wrong, and it’s too much for a person to handle while trying not to get shot in the head. A coach wouldn’t have the same problem. He could be working on solutions while the other players are playing, and have a change ready by the time the round ended. (Or, if you hire Art Shell, you’d get a man wondering what that funny thing in front of his mouth is.) It’d be better for demo reviews as well, because he’d already have an idea of what to look for from watching scrims. If, for some weird reason, the coach isn't watching them play live, at least he has enough time to go through a bunch of demos. Either way it would severely reduce the workload out of game and allow for quicker changes ingame.
(On a side note, it’s weird how other sports place such a high value on videotape while eSports has a built in taping function and doesn’t use it. Some baseball players review their own at bats during the game. Others have notes on every pitch from every pitcher they’ve ever faced. The reason most CS players look at demos is to make hack movies.)
The biggest problem would be how a coach fits in with the team. Bootman didn’t last long, but that’s not something limited to eSports and I don’t think it’s a reason to give up on the idea of having a coaching position. Let’s face it, when things go south in professional sports they’re the first ones to get fired – unless you’re Isiah Thomas in which case you get promoted. Certainly there’d be a lot of adjustments to make. One of the biggest changes would be allowing the coach to spectate matches live – the delay in an HLTV feed would make it virtually useless. I don’t know if there are any specific rules against allowing coaches to watch the matches, but it certainly flies in the face of most traditions. Teams don’t even allow team spectators in scrims, let alone matches. There’d be a period of adjustment ingame as well, but I think with the right person those problems would be minor. Sometimes a team and a coach just don’t mesh, but you can always get another person to do the job.
Think of it this way: if a team takes a risk on a coach and it doesn’t work out, what does it matter? It’s not like the players are going to be any worse. There’s probably a little salary that’d have to be paid, but as long as the coach doesn’t literally rob them it wouldn’t be that much money. But if it does work out, imagine how good Ksharp could be if he had a person dedicated to analyzing every demo, looking for subtle things to change to make him even better. We might have to call him Super K, and I can guarantee nobody would want to face his team on LAN.
