Turning a team of rookie players into Esports World Cup champions: Interview with Team Heretics VALORANT coach Neilzinho

Team Heretics are one of the world’s best VALORANT teams, having won the 2025 Esports World Cup and reached several other grand finals in recent years. They’re also one of the youngest, with several players in their late teens and early 20s.

In this special webinar with Pearson UK, which offers the Esports BTEC qualifications, British Esports Head of Education, Kalam Neale, interviews Neil ‘neilzinho’ Finlay, Scottish head coach of Team Heretics VALORANT team, about managing a team of rookies including UK talent Benjyfishy, and his coaching techniques. Neil offers some deep insight into coaching at a professional level.  

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Can you start by giving us a quick introduction please?  

Sure, I’m Neil. I’m the head coach of Team Heretics’ VALORANT team. So I’ve been doing that for three years now, and before that I used to play CSGO (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive) professionally, and then I transitioned into coaching.

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Your team won the Esports World Cup last year, a fantastic achievement. Can you just give us a bit of a flavour of that as an event, as a tournament, and obviously the success that you were able to have over there, from your point of view as the coach?

Yeah, I think the Esports World Cup for me was obviously the highlight of the year. And I think in 2024 it was like the first team ever which had that many rookies. So, we picked up four rookie players pretty much, and had an insane year. We had several grand final appearances. We finished second every time unfortunately, but yeah, three international top twos and top two at VALORANT Champions as well in 2024. 

So, coming into 2025, we had a lot of expectations to do better. So EWC for me was the highlight because we actually won an international. So it was good. It was a different experience. It was a very tough one as well. It was very gruelling – in a lot of tournaments you have a couple of days’ break in between games and the playoffs, but for us it was like single elimination. We played pretty much every single day. So it was tough and we had a really big comeback in the final. We were playing pretty poorly, we went two maps down, but then reverse swept Fnatic. So it was amazing. 

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“I think one thing young esorts players forget, or neglect, is the communication side of it. Especially in VALORANT. A lot of people just focus on stats, getting good kills, getting K/D, but when you get to the top, everyone is mechanically skilled. it’s the comms and team play that set you apart.”

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I think that journey of bringing that rookie roster now into a position where you’ve had that success in winning, that must have been really rewarding for you as a coach – the work that you’ve been able to do with the team and with the players to to finally see that culminate in that win. What does it take to actually get to that point? How long is the preparation and build up to a major tournament? 

It starts from the ground up, so this Heretics roster with the rookies was the first time I’d ever got full control of a team. So it was super rewarding because I picked everyone individually, basically to meet the kind of culture I wanted in the team. So I’d say, when you start it’s literally about the culture you build in your team, and that’s day one and you’re already preparing for the big events when you start your first day of practice. 

So in a typical year, in VALORANT anyway, if you do well, you kind of suffer from success. So, we had about 10 days off in 2025. So, we really start preparing in the off-season. So, we flew out to Berlin on January 2nd and that’s when it went full steam ahead. But before that, it’s just online practice and you’re already preparing for next year. 

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What does a day in the life of an esports coach and player look like?

It’s probably different for every coach, but for me anyway, I take a lot of time out in the mornings. The good thing about being head coach is you can design your schedule. So, if you want to come in at 3pm, we come in at 3pm. But it doesn’t really happen like that. So, we’re pretty fortunate. We’ve got our own office. We’ve got our own chef. We’ve got our own apartments. 

In the mornings, I’ll usually go for a walk for a couple of hours. I’ll try to do 25,000 to 30,000 steps a day. I’ll get up at 7 or 8am, go for a walk, clear my head, get into the office about 10am, and then the players will come in at around 12pm when we have lunch, and then, usually we start practice at about 1pm. And it just depends, every single day. I like to change the schedule so it’s not monotonous. So, sometimes it’ll be theory blocks, then practice, then if we’ve just played a tournament… or the way it works in Berlin is you’ve got an official every single week in the studio. And rest is very important. 

So in your 7-day week we usually play 5 days and we try to give them two days off, but it’s pretty difficult to be honest. So for sure they have one day off after the official every single time, and then the second off day is usually a team building activity. So we’ll go play football, go to the cinema, we try to do something physical… basketball, go-karting, something like that. Just something chill, because they are kids at the end of the day and they’re away from home. 

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It’s great to see Benjifishy doing so well, coming off the back of some Fortnite success. Now, he’s moved into a different game. How difficult is that? What are the key things that you look for in a player, in terms of talent? What were the areas where you’ve had to work on to bring Benjy and the rest of the team together? 

I think it’s not easy to do, that’s for sure. Uh Benjy is very unique – I think he’s one of the only players who’s managed to be at a really high level in Fortnite then transition to VALORANT. It’s not impossible. Benjy’s proven that. But I think for me when we trialled Benjy, he was only really playing VALORANT. He’d never been in a proper team. He had only been in tier three. So, I’d heard good things about him from Fortnite, in terms of his personality. And when we were building the team, that was something I was really focused on. I cared about mechanical skill, but it wasn’t at the top. It was more about how the personalities are going to work with each other. How’s everyone going to get on? And literally, during the first hour we trialled Benjy, I was like, we need to get this guy, cos he wasn’t incredible, but the potential was there. And it was mostly his communication. That’s what set him apart from everyone else.

I think that’s a lot of things young players forget, or neglect, is the communication side of it. Especially in VALORANT. A lot of people just focus on stats, getting good kills, getting K/D (a good kill/death ratio), but when you get to the top in tier one, everyone can shoot, everyone is mechanically skilled. There’s a ceiling that you can kind of hit. It’s the same with Counter-Strike. You hit the ceiling, everyone’s incredible, but it’s the comms and the team play that kind of set you apart. And Benjy had incredibly good communication. It was a bit panicky, so we did have to work on that a lot. It was coming from Fortnite, it’s a lot of screaming, and he’s used to playing with one other person or a maximum of 3v3, and now he was coming into a 5v5 environment. 

So, there’s a lot of things we did with the players, we used a lot of keywords and stuff like that in our game, just to shorten down the comms and make it less chaotic. It’s just small things like if you are flanking someone, instead of saying, “guys I’m behind I’m behind I’m behind,” you’ll say, “checkmate”. So something small like that for Benjy would help a lot. 

It was really small things like that, which we implemented and helped all the players with. So that was kind of the step from tier three to tier one. 

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Beyond the glitz and the glamour of the Esports World Cup and that first place result, is there anything else that maybe is not seen on the cameras? What are some of the things in terms of your work as a coach you feel most proud of?

Obviously winning is nice, but we never focus on the result, we just always focus on the process. That’s kind of like our motto in the team because if you focus on winning, then you obviously get super down if you don’t win. So, we don’t really care about the result, we just focus on the process. 

And I think for me, like even when we won, it was nice for about 15 minutes, and then you’re already thinking, “okay, we need to go back and we need to play again”. So it was important to celebrate the win, which we did, obviously. But for me I guess the best achievement is just seeing them as players and people, outside of the game, because our team is one of the youngest in the world. So it’s like coaching 18-year-old kids – some of them couldn’t even load a dishwasher or wash their clothes. So having them come in and then see them evolve a bit and maturing, we had two Turkish guys who couldn’t really speak English and then after a couple of months they’re fluent. They’re using English words and British slang. It’s kind of funny. 

We had like a real family kind of bond in our team, and I think that is the thing I’m the most proud of, because we got a lot of recognition for it as well, from the community and from Riot Games themselves. So we built a really good family kind of vibe and a really safe place to work, basically. It’s really mental health oriented. I think it was just the culture that we built is the I thing I’m the most proud of, apart from the wins. 

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When we first spoke to you a few months ago, it was just after we launched our Duty to Care in Esports programme, which is all about holistic care of players. It’s about trying to raise standards across esports in general. And I think from our first conversation, it was clear you guys were already delivering what we were creating – a lot of that work was already happening. What is your coaching philosophy? How do you see your role?

I went to uni, but a lot of the stuff I’ve implemented in the team is from things I’ve taught myself from either playing the game or playing VALORANT and playing Counter-Strike. I was an IGL (in-game leader) so a lot of the skills were transferable. 

I did a lot of mental health work at uni with my construction degree, and then in terms of philosophy, I learned a lot of it from football, so people like Pep Guardiola and Alex Ferguson, I’ve taken bits and pieces from everyone and just learned from failing, to be honest.

I can’t really say I’ve got a solid philosophy, I feel like for me it changes a lot and I want to keep it that way, because I don’t want to be super focused on one thing. I like to be able to adapt, especially in VALORANT, you have to maybe change the way you think, especially tactically – you can either play super structured but then there could be a patch that comes out and then it completely changes it. You have to play less structured, less utility. 

So for me, the most important thing is I like for the players to have freedom. I’m not the kind of coach that will hammer them and tell them you have to do it this way, because at the end of the day I’m not the one playing the game. I’m not as good as Benjy. I’m not as good as the players that we have. 

I think it was Guardiola that said, “I’m not going to tell Messi how to finish”, and it’s something I stick by.

Like, I’m not going to tell them how to finish. I’ll guide them. But we like to have a lot of freedom and autonomy for me is the most important thing. So, we give them a lot of responsibility. I’ll give them homework like they’re at school. I’ll tell them, “go make a strat, come back, present it to me tomorrow,” or if we’re doing a VOD review. 

Sometimes me and the assistant coach won’t do it. If it’s been a good game, if it’s been a bad game, we tell them to go do the VOD review and present it to us. And then that way. they focus on the good things and the bad things. Something again that I believe in a lot as a coach, is focusing on the things you do well, because if you focus only on the bad… you know you might have like four or five bad rounds, but a lot of the time you’re winning rounds, and it’s very easy to just ignore the good things. But we drive home the stuff that they do well every day cos that’s what we want them to repeat. 

So autonomy and getting them to focus on what they do well a lot of the time is what we do day-to-day. 

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What is it like in that team environment? You’ve got lots of big personalities in that group and everyone’s different. People will respond and react in different ways. Do you have different approaches on an individual basis, as well as the whole team approach? 

Yeah, 100%. I think it is a misconception that everyone thinks it’s a dictatorship when you get to the top. You do have to be strict, but the way that we have it, the culture in our team – I’m not an angry person. So, if I even raise my voice, they’re like, “Oh my god, we really p****d Neil off, we need to be careful!”

And then, so it’s like, just the respect is what helps you keep things balanced. Everyone’s different. So, we had two Eastern Europeans and they respond well to being told direct, “that’s terrible. What are you doing?” 

But someone like Benjy, he’s a very emotional player, so, if you tell Benjy like, “mate, that’s terrible,” he will take it to heart. 

So, you have to kind of say it in a totally different way. You know, like, “Benjy, that’s not ideal. Next time could you do this?” 

Or you just ask the question, why did you do that? You know, you don’t always have to go and say, “that was bad”. You can even just ask the question, and that’s how we lead a lot of our things. We’ll say, you know, can you tell me why you did that? Why do you think it was a good play? And if they can’t justify it, then that’s when you teach them. 

When you get to the top, 99% of the time when they make a mistake, they know they’ve made a mistake already. So you don’t need to tell them they’ve made a mistake. You just ask the question, “do you think that was the right play?” 

99% of the time they’ll say, “no, it was bad.” 

So, yeah, that’s usually how we lead it. It’s not screaming at them. You don’t always tell them straight away. You give them the opportunity to kind of admit their mistake or give them the opportunity to learn. And then if they don’t get it, then you can teach them. And it becomes a lot less monotonous that way, because you don’t want an environment where players are too scared to play with freedom. When the pressure hits, you usually fall back to the level of practice that you have. So in practice, if you’re constantly hammering them for making mistakes, as soon as pressure hits, they’re going to go into their shell and they’re not going to make plays, you know, they’re going to play scared. And they’re going to play to not lose, instead of playing to win. 

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“I like my players to have freedom. I’m not the kind of coach that will hammer them and tell them you have to do it this way, because I’m not the one playing the game. I’m not as good as the players that we have. I think it was Guardiola that said, ‘I’m not going to tell Messi how to finish’, and it’s something I stick by.”

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Do you try to simulate scenarios in training? Do you put conditions on practices to try and simulate or replicate things that could happen? 

Sometimes. It depends. Every single team is different. I think the way that we do it is pretty good. We have different scrim blocks. So, we have a green scrim block which is when you’re implementing new strats. We have a red scrim block, which is like you’re playing to win. You’re treating it like an official. 

Then we’ll have a performance day sometimes where you won’t play the full rounds in practice. You’ll play as an official. You’ll do your attack pauses. We sometimes put background noise in, but it’s kind of hard to replicate, especially at the internationals because your table shakes and stuff when you hear the crowd. So, you can’t really prepare for that. But it does help a little bit. It gets you in the mindset. You’ll never replicate in practice what you feel on stage when you can hear the crowd and your table’s shaking. But you can put them under enough pressure that they’ll make more mistakes in practice, and then you can kind of vod review it. So, it’s definitely beneficial. 

We’ll also have a discovery day, where we give them complete freedom. So, we’ll literally tell them, “alright guys, pick three different comps that you want to play, show us your ideas, and just go have fun”. 

And that’s where we found a lot of our best ideas, because it’s complete freedom and free flowing and they are really open to giving ideas and they want to express their creativity. So that’s where we found some of the best stuff.

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What about that moment just before we go into competition or just before you go onto stage? Do you guys have a routine? Are there any messages that you give them? What’s your approach to trying to support the players in that moment just before they go into that environment? 

So for us, if we’ve got an official, it depends if you know you’ve got one coming up and you have a week or so to prepare. It’s a little bit different to being in a tournament and it’s one after the other after the other. But usually it starts the night before, to be honest. So we’ll wind down the practice. If our official is on Saturday, the Friday night before will be quite a short day, just to keep them hungry. We let them go do what they want. And I’ll usually send a message in the group that night telling them to focus and do some visualization, like think about how they’re going to prepare, and make sure they get a good sleep. 

We usually try and mimic our practice to what time the official is. So they’ll practice the whole week at the same time that the official will take place. So it does start the week before, and then in the morning at Riot events anyway, it’s not like you just turn up an hour before. You’ve got quite a few commitments. So you turn up usually three or four hours before – you’ve got quite a bit of downtime. You do hair and makeup. You sometimes have to do content, feature shots. So it’s quite difficult because you’re going there with the mindset that you’re about to play a big game, but then you’ve got makeup, you’ve got content, you’ve got interviews, and then you get like an hour to warm up. 

So, usually, we’ll give them a little debrief. We’ve done all the hard preparation, so we’ll just give them some notes, some reminders, any anti-strats. We’ve not had a performance coach consistently, but when we do, they’ll usually do a physical warm-up. So, doing little games with tennis balls. In EWC, there was a reactions game where you would hit the lights. Benjy loved that. But usually I just let them do their own routine. If anyone’s got their own kind of specific routine that they want to do like 30 minutes before, it’s completely up to them how they want to prepare. Some people don’t even play. They just listen to music or they’ll just sit and chill with their eyes closed and they’ll visualise. I like to give everyone their own personal time to prepare how they want to prepare. 

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TEAM UPDATE ON VCT KICK OFF & EMEA CLASH pic.twitter.com/EjRBphIHF7

— Heretics Valorant (@HereticsVal) February 19, 2026

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There are the nutritional, physical and mental health aspects of esports. Is there any insight you can give into those three areas?

Yeah. Nutrition wise, we’re lucky enough to have a chef. He’ll always cook something fairly healthy. He’s from the UK as well, so being in Berlin, on Sundays, he’ll do like a an English breakfast, which is nice. All the Turkish guys love it now as well! 

On game day, it won’t be anything too heavy. It’s either like chicken, some rice, or he’ll do a steak sometimes. He’ll just do fillet steak and potatoes and then some salad or something like that. He always gives us a smoothie as well. And then every single morning before we practice, we always take electrolytes before we play. During the official days, our caffeine is also calculated.

So we don’t take too much caffeine. We don’t want the players crashing. We don’t really drink sugary drinks, they might have some sugar-free energy drinks. We try to limit how much sugar they take in between games or in between maps. They usually have bananas, or they’ll have a little snack at the studio, but nothing too heavy. And we usually time our meals about 3 hours before we play. So everything is quite calculated to be honest. 

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That sounds exactly the same as a professional sports athlete, the type of diet and preparation and the things that they focus on. Again you look at the misconception of gaming and esports. People may think the opposite, that it is a high caffeine and sugary drink environment with unhealthy foods, but that’s not the case. 

For us, we have a mandatory three days a week at the gym. If they don’t want to go to the gym, we don’t want to force them, because a lot of them don’t want to do weights as they don’t want to ruin their wrists. But they do physical exercise… almost every single one of them cycles into the office, it’s about a 25 minute bike ride. So they’ve all got bikes that they get from Heretics, which is nice. 

And then during practice days, we’ll have a 15/20 minute walk during the break as well, sometimes 30 minutes if it’s a nice day, get some sunlight.

And then in terms of mental health, it’s something that I’ve pushed a lot. I don’t think it’s common in a lot of tier one teams right now. I just focus on it a lot because like I said, I did my dissertation on it at uni. I focused on construction and project management, and I see a lot of similarities between that and gaming.

We always have a culture where we tell everyone to speak up. We had one player last year who was still at school and I basically told him he’s not coming to Shanghai – we got a stand-in because mentally I don’t think he was in a good spot -he was completely burnt out. So, we kind of made the decision to bring a stand-in and give him a bit of a break. 

We also have, again, probably unique to our team, I’m not sure, but we give everyone the option to fly home and practice from home for a week, if they want. So, a couple of the guys have done it, especially during the season, because it’s very different to Counter-Strike. In VALORANT, it doesn’t look like you have as many games, but if anything, like in CS, you get to play from home. So, you’re at home for three weeks, then you go to a tournament, then you come back home for 3 weeks. 

In VALORANT, you’re literally in a different country every single day of the week, away from your family, away from your friends. So, that can take a big toll on your mental health, especially when your days can be quite full on. You’re going to the office, you’re playing, you’re going home, you’re going to sleep, you’re waking up. So we give them the option to go home and practice from home if they want. And that helped a lot. 

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Some parents are incredibly clued up on this esports lifestyle and what it involves. What are the differences for you in terms of coaching in different environments? If players are online, if they’re at home, if they’re in person at the venue. What are the pros and cons of online play versus actually having people physically in the same location? 

I never used to think it was a big difference until I was there full-time for two years, and then I noticed a huge difference in being in person. I think there are some benefits from being online, obviously, especially in the off-season. You are in a place where you’re familiar, you’re with your family, you’re with your friends. It’s a lot easier to switch off from the game, because you can finish playing, you can go out with your friends, you can go for a drive or for a walk, you can go where you want. You’ve got all your familiarities, you’ve got your own bed. You’ve maybe got a girlfriend or wives for some people. So you’ve got all those perks online. 

But if you’re talking strictly performance, being in person is a completely different mindset, because you are in the mindset of playing and that’s it. You think about the game, you live and breathe it. And that’s something that players especially have to have, honestly, if they want to be the best. You can’t just treat it like a normal 9 to 5, where you come in, you turn your PC on at 9 or 10 and you turn it off [at the end of the day]. Even if we’ve got a seven or eight hour scrim day, a lot of the guys will still play four or five hours of ranked on top of that – and streaming. So, they are long days, but that gives you such an edge compared to teams that don’t do it. 

It’s also a lot easier to coach in person because you can actually see people and you can tell a lot. You can hear what they’re saying in communication, obviously, but just by looking at them and seeing their mannerisms and seeing how they’re reacting to something, you can tell a lot by facial expressions and you can notice if someone’s off. 

We do a vibe check every morning. We’ll ask the guys how they’re feeling. We do physical one-on-ones every week with the players just to make sure they’re good. You can still do it online, but it’s a lot harder to tell if they’re actually telling you the truth because if there’s something going on, they might not want to, you know. 

So it’s a lot easier to coach in person when you can see them, when you can relate to them, when you can have a bond with them, when you can go out with them. Online is still great, but there are a lot of distractions online, I find. If they’re at home sometimes – even with tier one players – they’re making a living, but their mum will still come into the room halfway through practice with a hoover or something. Or cars are beeping outside, or one of the guys shares a bedroom with his sister still, so like she’ll come in sometimes. Just random stuff like that. Or they’ll get food delivered, which obviously you can’t control what they eat. Not that you have to control what they eat, but if you’ve been in the office the whole time and you’re eating a strict diet, sometimes when they go home they want to get carry-outs. So you can’t control what they eat. Again, you are dealing with kids. 

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It feels like you’ve got a really good balance there. In terms of the people within Team Heretics, how does this function? How does this professional organisation actually work? How big is the overall team? Do you have different coaches focusing on different things? Do you have lots of support roles? Is it you doing a number of roles with a couple of key people around you? Can you give us a bit of an insight into that please? 

Every org is different. The one thing I love about working at Heretics is I have a lot of control, which is nice for a coach, because I’m in charge of everything when it comes to VALORANT. 

So I can control when we start, when we finish, as long as we perform well, it doesn’t really matter. I can give us 4 days off if we want 4 days off – that doesn’t really happen. In the office day-to-day, it’s just me and I have one other coach [weber], who I work together really closely with. I’ve known him for 17 years, we used to play on a team in CS together. 

So we have a really good relationship. Technically he’s the assistant coach, but we share a lot of responsibilities and we treat each other as equals. So there’s no real hierarchy, it’s very collaborative and we’re on the same page. Apart from that, there’s Niklas, our manager who deals with everything in German because I can’t speak German. So he manages League of Legends and VALORANT in Berlin.

Then we have the office in Madrid, where we see the CEOs once a year or something. So they don’t really have any involvement at all. The big office in Madrid is where all the staff are and content and tons of other teams as well. The vast majority of stuff goes on in Madrid. 

In Berlin it’s literally just playing. So we’ve got a VALORANT team, a League of Legends team, the assistant coach is there, Niklas our manager and the chef, and that’s it. So we’re kind of just like a very small group in Berlin. And then maybe me and my assistant all work with the in-game leader on stuff day-to-day. We did have an analyst part-time, who was a student at school, so he was doing analytical stuff part-time, but myself and the other coach, we basically share the analyst role, so we do our own kind of anti-strat and that’s how it works. But it’s very different sometimes. Some teams will have, you know, three or four coaches and they will have more resources than we do. But it’s not that we can’t. I just prefer it this way. 

We work really well as a small group of staff and it’s actually got benefits and downsides obviously when it’s in a middle tournament. There are nights where I’m awake for like 20 hours, but I’d rather have that than, you know, another two or three analysts, for example, who don’t really have much to do. 

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UK stats from the Esports World Cup 2025:

• Number of Players: 48
• Number of Coaches: 25
• Number of Managers: 9
• Number of Substitutes: 3

UK players secured three 1st-place finishes:

1. Team Redline x Rennsport: Luke Bennett and Sebastian Job
2. Team Heretics x VALORANT: benjyfishy

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That role of a coach has many different roles underneath it. You mentioned your university work – can you tell us a bit about your journey from a construction degree and a passion for sport and esports as a background, to then actually taking it seriously and moving into a full-time role. 

I think for me, I’ve always been into esports. Like I said, I was a player in CSGO for 9/10 years in the UK, but back then you didn’t really make enough money to make a steady career. So, I was pretty much living off prize money. We won quite a lot in the UK, so it was decent. We survived. But then I quit in 2015/2016 to get a normal job. That’s when I went to college, did construction and I was still playing part-time, then I transitioned to a coach in CS. I just did it to see if I enjoyed it, because I was the in-game leader in CS, before, and there were a lot of similarities in leading a team and then coaching a team.

Everything was kind of self-taught. I didn’t have a course or anything to help me. I went to uni, graduated with a first in construction project management and I was fully set on going down that route. I was already working for a house builder. I got to a point in my life where I was at a crossroads, because covid happened and then lockdown. So I got put on furlough, then VALORANT came out and playing that was a lot of fun. I was coaching a team and we got quite good. I was still on furlough and then G2 came and asked me to be head coach. 

Then furlough stopped and then I was at this crossroads where I was like, do I use my degree that I’ve just got and pick the safe option, or do I do what I love doing right now, which is VALORANT? The opportunity to join a team like G2 doesn’t come up very often, so I took it, we did really well and I’ve kind of just stayed there [as a coach] since. But there is a lot of transferable things I would say – you’re managing people in construction, you’re managing big projects, it’s very stressful, but it’s nowhere near as stressful as this – being a head coach in VALORANT. It’s kind of crazy when you think about it like that – it’s less stressful building a massive building than it was [a VALORAN team]!

I think that’s what I love about it. It’s stressful but it’s something that always changes, and you get to travel a lot, make your own schedule and get to work with people you enjoy working with. So yeah, I think if I didn’t have the degree, I think it would have made it harder for me to transition into a coach, because it’s one thing I learned in G2. I’d come from an esports background, so I was so focused as a coach on the tactical side of things.

It wasn’t until after G2 where I realised I needed to not focus on the game as much, I needed to focus on the players, and that’s where I’m at now. I still obviously have a lot of input in the game, but my main job is focusing on the personalities and the people that are playing the game. And we split the tactical side up. But as a head coach, that’s something I’ve learned – your main priority should always be the players and the culture and the environment, because that is the most important thing. 

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“After VALORANT launched, G2 asked me to be head coach. Then covid furlough stopped and I was at this crossroads where I was like, do I use my degree that I’ve just got and pick the safe option, or do I do what I love doing right now, which is VALORANT?”

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If I rewind the clocks to uh when we did a lot of consultation around developing our coaching programs, developing our facilities here at the National Esports Performance Campus, to provide those spaces for esports teams to train and have in-person experiences. Some teams were very focused on the game and some were focused on the coaching process. Would you say they both have equal importance now? 

I feel like it needs to be a 50-50 balance because to get respect from the players and what you’re telling them, you have to know what you’re talking about in the game. You can get away with it if you have another coach who is pure game knowledge, but I think it’s always good to have a lot of game knowledge yourself and just be confident in what you’re saying. You’re never going to be right 100% of the time. At this level you’re coaching the best players in the world, so you’re gonna be right, they’re gonna be right, they’re going to be wrong, I’m going to be wrong. 

But it’s just about learning from it and learning from the mistakes. I think it is just a 50/50 balance and that’s the kind of way we do it. My other coach as well also has the same 50/50 balance. He’s also really involved in the culture aspect and looking after the players, but when the time’s right, we talk about the game, and mentality and personalities. 

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Have you had any experience of somebody who might be hard to coach or hard to approach? Do you have any strategies for potentially breaking down barriers or people who are not as open to being coached initially? 

Yeah, I’ve had some experiences of having really hard players to coach. Luckily, these guys aren’t in that bracket. I think it comes down to the luxury of having the chance to build your own team. We haven’t inherited anyone that we maybe found it hard to coach in the past. So that’s the best way you can mitigate it, by choosing the right people from the start with the right mindset. 

But sometimes you can help people and it’s basically just trying to understand why they’re frustrated if it’s something you can control. But sometimes unfortunately players are just not in the right mindset. And I’ve had players in the past who are incredibly talented and we’ve tried really hard to make it work. We’ve tried to support them. 

One player in the past we just had to kind of cut ties, because we tried so, so much to help him and he just didn’t want help or couldn’t understand why it was helpful. So that’s why I’d always say having the right mindset and having the kind of emotional maturity to improve as a player is so important, because you can be super talented, but if you don’t have the right mindset, it can unfortunately hinder you quite a bit. 

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Guest questions on the webinar

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What would you say is one of the hardest things to manage with your players, as a coach?

Probably stuff that I can’t control. So, things like their personal life. They’re away from home all the time, so sometimes they have girlfriend issues, they have family issues, so just trying to support them is the easiest thing you can do, but it’s not something you can always have instant results in, so that’s one of the most difficult things I would say.

And then obviously if they’re not playing too good, that’s also quite difficult to manage because we can’t control their emotions, we can only just support them. So yeah, probably a balance of both of those things. Things that you can’t control, and it’s not like I should be able to control them. They have to learn from their own experiences sometimes. 

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How do you help players to get themselves back from being frustrated, from being tilted? I suppose as well also to add to that, you know, if there are any key in-game moments or moments in time where frustration can spill over, what techniques do you use to get them back into that optimal zone? 

For me, most of the time when someone’s frustrated or tilted, I’d say a massive percentage of it is just down to them not understanding the situation. Maybe they’re overthinking it. They might focus so much on themselves and they don’t think about how they could have included a teammate to make their situation a bit easier. So, we always kind of just ask them why they’re frustrated, what emotions are they feeling, and most of the time it’s just that they’ve made the wrong decision and they keep consistently making the wrong decision. And that’s what leads them to being a bit tilted and a bit frustrated.

Every scenario is different when someone gets frustrated or tilted. So yeah, if it’s purely in game, we just look at how we can solve it in game, or a lot of it can be stuff that you can’t control outside of the game. It’s about seeing what’s caused the frustration, basically. 

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What helps to set them apart and actually get them noticed and progress from collegiate level into potentially semi-pro professional level esports?  

Well, it depends what game you play, but for us, playing in the kind of collegiate tournaments [like the British Esports Student Champs] is actually really good, because you get structure in a team. You get the chance to show yourself. So, we do look at those leagues as well, in terms of scouting. If you play ranked as well in the game, in VALORANT for example, we always look at people that are consistently playing ranked and getting to a high level. 

Basically showing yourself in those tournaments is a really good way [to go up a level]. But then if you do get the chance to trial [with a team], having a really good mindset and outlook and a good personality will always set you apart from someone that’s just skillful and maybe doesn’t talk as much or communication. It’s the one thing that we instantly use to separate people: someone that has good communication and they’re a really good teammate and they’re open to good feedback or bad feedback. 

Someone who can also give feedback as well, in a positive way. That’s something that sets people apart. 

Neil, thank you so much for your time, this has been very insightful.

Thank you.