Season 9 of the RLCS came with some surprises, one of which being Team Singularity’s 7th place finish. The team, fully comprised of rookies, includes Leon ‘Godsmilla’ Mares, Thomas ‘ThO’ Binkhorst, Joseph ‘noly’ Kidd and newly acquired coach, Jake ‘Jake’ Edwards.

Team Singularity (originally known as Flomp Resont, before being picked up by the Danish organisation) formed in August 2019. The team went on to qualify for the Rival Series (RLRS), finishing 4th in League Play before defeating Complexity twice in the promotion playoffs, to make it to the RLCS for the first time in the 3 players’ history.

The team defied more odds recently by winning The European Invitational, beating fellow RLCS teams Team Vitality and Endpoint on the way, and securing the $10,000 grand prize. Godsmilla himself is no stranger to the professional Rocket League scene, competing in multiple RLRSs, Dreamhack Valencia and more. He spoke with GGRecon to discuss the team, his competition, and the Rocket League Spring Series.

First off, congratulations on the victory in JohnnyBoi’s European Invitational! What was that like as a tournament, especially with a team like Sandrock involved?

Thank you so much first of all. Honestly compared to RLCS it felt very casual, I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was us knowing Johnny as more of a friend instead of a tournament organiser and a caster. It felt very, very casual and almost felt like scrims, but with money involved, which was nice. With Sandrock, it was nice to play against them in a big tournament, because before we played them in like small weekly tournaments but it’s nice to see a team from the Middle-Eastern region finally get a chance to prove themselves against the best teams in the world. And for everyone else, it’s nice to see how they play and I’m pretty sure that every team that faced off against them learned a lot about how they played, because they’re very different to all the other teams in Europe.

In the RLCS you managed a 7th place finish with a 4-5 record. What was the atmosphere like within the team after securing your RLCS Season 10 spot against Monaco?

It was okay, like before the season we were expected to get 10th by Reddit, Twitter and all the casters, but we in ourselves knew that we could achieve a lot together, and we knew that we’re a really underrated team. Our own personal goal was to get top 6 and we knew we could do that, but we had a kinda slow start in the RLCS. We kinda underestimated how the pressure would affect us, and we underestimated how teams would perform in the RLCS [compared to] how they perform in scrims. We did feel pretty good at the end, because we made a decent comeback and secured our spot for next season which is better than dropping back to RLRS [laughs]. I think we managed to prove a lot of people wrong about us, and we’re looking forward to perform[ing] a lot better next season.

The first 5 matches of the season couldn’t have been against tougher opponents, a victory over RV is something nobody expected. How much did that boost everybody's confidence?

I don’t think so actually. I think all of the teams in EU are really closely together skill wise, I don’t think there’s that much of a gap. So, I think even instead of Vitality, if we beat Endpoint that week; we would’ve got the same amount of confidence.

Touching on the team, you’ve got 2 shining stars in ThO and Noly. Just on ThO, what is he like as a player?

I like what ScrubKilla said about him recently on one of his streams, he said “ThO has one of the best mechanics in the game, he is very hard to play against. But he does not play very smart.” That’s what makes him so hard to play against. It is really hard to read what he is doing. Because of his good mechanics he is really really fast in doing all of the things he does as well. His role in the team is that he just causes trouble for the opponents, makes sure that we don’t miss out on pressure, and just tries to force mistakes.