Over the past weekend, (March 13th – 15th) trials for the Overwatch Mini World Cup were held by manager Stefan “PhoenixTears” Morris and coach Bracken “BLuR” Lee-Rudolph. Twenty-eight players battled it out over five sessions to get a seat at the Mini World Cup team table. We decided to grab PhoenixTears and BLuR into an interview to hopefully give us some insight on not only the Overwatch Mini World Cup itself but also the processes and preparation they will be putting the team through ahead of games.

Can you explain in a little detail what the Overwatch Mini World Cup is?

PhoenixTears: “We got a message about two or three weeks ago saying that an organization would like to hold a Mini World Cup for players 3150sr and below. We thought it was such a fantastic idea since we have so many players around that level who do take the game seriously. We have such a great community and we can really make a go of this. It’s a round-robin competition with ten nations (South Africa, Sweden, France, Denmark, Netherlands, Germany, United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Switzerland, Belgium, and the United States). It’s going to be happening over the next five to six weeks which then goes into play-offs (dates have not been released yet). This is a great opportunity for South Africa to put our names on the map, it’s not a huge tournament yet but I believe it could get there. We have an incredibly committed team along with our coach and manager who is taking everything very seriously. I think all the games will be very very close which is always awesome to watch, its very different from the Overwatch World Cup where there are only three of four nations that are close skill-wise. This will be a little more fun in the sense that you don’t know whose going to win. It’s also a great way to get to know some more of the up and coming talent in South Africa. These players haven’t reached their peak just yet but it’ll give us a glimpse at who will come up as professional players in South Africa.”

BLuR: “So the Overwatch Mini World Cup is a non-blizzard affiliated event, its an event being organized to help players of a slightly lower level than you would be expecting to see at the official Overwatch World Cup, Contenders and Overwatch League. These players have an opportunity to play at a high tier event where they are playing against players from other countries representing their national teams. The peak for this tournament is 3150 sr which is low diamond and it’s a pretty good barometer of where you’d start seeing players looking to push to the point where they could end up in Contenders trials or top sixteen Open Division. For our purposes, it’s something that allows our lower tier players to also get a little bit of exposure to that kind of highly organized, highly drilled playstyle. Hopefully, this will be a start to bridging the gap between them and our really high tier teams that we would want to be sending to the Overwatch World Cup.”

How were the coach and manager picked? What was the process?

PhoenixTears: “Coaches and managers were able to put their names forward along with a small description and a motivational reasoning for why you should choose them. Some of the COWZA (Competitive Overwatch South Africa) admins and players who would be interested got together and ended up voting. BLuR got voted in for coach and I for the manager, it was basically all the people who intended to trial got a vote.”

PhoenixTears, you’re already the backbone of a couple of teams, so what is your approach to managing this team? How have you prepared for such an important task?

PhoenixTears: “I think we had to approach it in a very different way, whereas normally we would want to take a lot of time to make our decisions on who would make the team and how we would do things. Instead, it was a very quick decision as we had to make the team within a week. As a manager, I just want to approach all the backroom stuff, like the admin, trying to promote the players and the team whereas BLuR would focus more on getting the players ready for the tournament. In a perfect world, we would have loved more time but we are approaching it in a way where we are taking as much time as we need in the constraints that we have. We don’t want to rush things, we’d like to have as many practices as possible but at the same time, we have to get things done.”

For a lot of people in the South African Overwatch scene, BLuR is a household name in terms of coaching. Can you elaborate on this a little and explain in your opinion what is essential in a coach?

BLuR: “I’d say the biggest thing that’s essential in a coach, more so than game mechanics or metanology(the study of current composition gameplay), is that there has to be an understanding of team dynamics. Mechanics and metanology are still incredibly important, but fundamentally it doesn’t matter if your players are good or bad, the way they succeed or fail as a team is how you can get them to coordinate and play as well as problem solve and interact as a cohesive unit. It’s not only applicable to games, sports or even an organized competitive environment, but it’s also applicable in everyday environments. You have to teach people how to instill a process of learning and problem solving amongst themselves. I’ll ask questions such as ‘okay how could we go about taking this team fight better in future?’ and then they will look at it and say ‘we could have used this or done this instead’. That kind of attitude then provides us a better platform for them to be in-game without me, which allows them to problem solve as needed.”

Can you two explain the criteria you were looking for in the players during trials?

PhoenixTears: “I personally looked for skill, game sense, how you play on a team and how they communicated within the trial teams. What could each player bring in a team environment and by that I mean can they shot call, can they target call and will they contribute to comms (communications) the right way. We looked for positive members present in the comms and at what kind of character they are within the team.”

BLuR: “As I’ve said to everyone involved in the process, I’m actually very open about what the criteria for picking players were. Obviously, I’m not gonna talk about the specific players but I’ll happily talk about the general things I looked for. We looked at who our best players in that skill bracket are, whose going to be playing in those team spaces and showing who has the mechanical skill that we need. Past that we’re looking at a situation where we have players that are fundamentally quite communicative, so how do they speak, how do they call things, what do they call, etc. Communication is incredibly important for a cohesive team environment, obviously there’s a little more work that has to be done on that but that’s more for practice than it is for trials. In that, we put our players on fundamentally cohesive compositions that have been run in Contenders, Overwatch League and all sorts of high tier competitions so that we know fundamentally from a theory perspective that those compositions work. What we were looking at in that process is how do these players engage with these compositions and how do these players problem solve within them. We were looking for players to use their brains and showcase how they engage with meta that’s beyond the usual ‘okay we need more healing’ or ‘our DPS needs to hit more shots’.”

In your opinion how does one begin preparing such a new team in the limited time available? What are some of the hurdles that you could face?

BLuR: “As much as they are a new team in the sense that they haven’t really played together very much, I’d say that the team we picked all have a very similar understanding of what they need to be doing within the game. Due to the selection process, I think that we have a team that’s set out for that. However, with the practice process being such that it is, you know we play our first match in about two weeks, we just got our trial process done and submitted our team on Sunday (March 15) so we will only have one or two practices at most before then. What I’m looking to do is establish our communication routines, make sure that we have a cohesive structure to that. We don’t only have one match, we have a few so what we can do at the very least is make sure we have a cohesive structure for calling in place and to have a variety of compositions to play. Since we’re putting them against players that are around their average skill level, I think that we could pull out a couple of surprises against them, especially in the early game.”

Anything else you would like to add?

PhoenixTears: “I just want to say please come support us, we’re going to be having some content coming out soon, so you get to know the players a bit more. We want as much of the community involved as possible. We are definitely going to be organizing some watch parties, so everyone gets together, feels the hype together and can really get behind this team cause these twelve members deserve it. Everyone has worked very hard and it would mean a lot if everyone came to support them.”

BLuR: “I think id just like to give a big shout out to the community that made this all happen, we had more than 28 people sticking around for the trials and that’s great. If we could send multiple teams we would, but we, unfortunately, can’t so we just have to thank all the players that showed up and made this such an interesting trial process. I’ve been happy to give constructive feedback to everyone that did trial because they have said that they would like to do more seasons of the Overwatch Mini World Cup and I’d like to see those players come back in a month or two and really show us what they can do. Yeah, just another thank you to the community for making this viable and I’m super proud of the way that South Africans get behind it.”

We also took a little bit of time to get a small quote from the players and get their opinions on being on the team.

“It helped bring the community together and meeting new players from the scene is always fun to make new friends.” -Pretz (Main Tank)

“Looking forward to see how we perform against other countries.” -Authorize (Main Support)

“I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to be able to play in the Mini World Cup Tournament. I hope that I can perform as well as expected for my team to show the incredible talent that South Africa has to offer.” -JellyDoodle (Flex Support)

“It’s a great opportunity to represent my country while playing with people of similar skill all over the world. It’s nice to see many other players from SA interested in competitive Overwatch despite our lack of local servers.” -Darkstar (Flex tank)

“I’m just happy to be here.” -RinkuHaireru (Projectile DPS)

“One thing about being here would be, no way this is happening proceeded with giggling like a 6-year-old school girl.” -WreXu (Hitscan DPS)

“That is has motivated me to start working harder, and afforded me with the opportunity to play with an interesting group of people that I otherwise wouldn’t have.” -Seraphim (Flex Support)

“I think it is a great opportunity and really awesome to be part of a community that wants to work together to achieve greatness.” – Smiley (Main Support)

“I’m super excited to play on a team with everyone and can’t wait to see how we show the world what we are made of!” -TerranLord (Projectile DPS)

“Let’s click on heads!” -TriggerHappy (Flex Tank)

“Looking forward to winning the tourney.” JRV (Hitscan)

“I trialed to play hitscan DPS for team South Africa and I feel that our scene has so much outstanding talent. I believe this tournament will be a chance for South Africa to prove that we have enough passion for Overwatch that can rival that of the top teams in the world.” -Maestro (Main Tank)

Overall the Overwatch Mini World Cup is an incredible opportunity for South Africa and all that are involved, be it players, or the coaches and managers. We look forward to supporting our team as they continue on this journey, we know they will do South Africa proud.