It’s already March 27 and our season is just about to start. How crazy is that?

To put it mildly, our last few months have been a bit crazy, driven by — obviously — the Covid19 outbreak. I want to open up the curtains a bit to give a peek into what we went through to even be in a position to play our first match tomorrow.

Here are some high(low?)lights:

As some of you are just now experiencing in the West, our business and operations staff have been working from home since the end of January. Many of our staff are new to the organization and new to their roles, having been hired after the 2019 season ended as we transitioned our operations from L.A. to China. So we’ve been learning to work together remotely across multiple regions to manage nightmarish logistics at the height of the Covid19 outbreak in China and S. Korea, even as we were all just starting to get to know each other. (Apologies to anyone who has been on calls with me with my kids screaming in the background.)

As I wrote previously, we moved our players from China to S. Korea right after Wuhan was locked down. But our Chinese players and coaches didn’t have Korean visas (and some of them still don’t), so they couldn’t travel with their teammates to Seoul. The end result is that we haven’t been able train and hold meetings/review sessions together as a full team under one roof since the end of January.

After the bulk of the team moved to Seoul, they had to fend for themselves because the support staff we hired in China couldn’t travel and thus couldn’t do much to help on the ground in Seoul. This meant that our GM John and Team Manager Cassis had to find training and housing solutions literally upon landing in Seoul, coordinate on visas (more on that craziness below), source PCs and equipment, provide daily support, while keeping an eye on everyone’s health and safety as the Covid19 outbreak hit S. Korea.

Our marketing efforts were significantly impacted. The marketing team we built in China still can’t travel, so we haven’t been able to create as much content as we would like, to engage our fans. We made a significant investment to build a 3,000 square meter training facility in Foshan with multiple scrim rooms, streaming booths, team kitchen and pantry, work space and meeting rooms, and a fully functional gym — this beautiful facility is now sitting empty while our team trains out of a hotel conference room with borrowed PCs in Seoul.

As for visas, as mentioned above, our Chinese players/staff need visas to enter S. Korea, while our Chinese, Korean and European players/staff need visas to enter the U.S. As if that weren’t complex enough, because of the Covid19 outbreak, Korean and U.S. consulates in China stopped processing visas for an extended period, while U.S. and most Asian countries implemented travel restrictions and mandatory quarantine. So when the league pivoted toward makeup matches in Los Angeles after our homestands were cancelled, we had to start a mad scramble to accelerate our work on U.S. P1 visas. The players that moved with the team to Seoul were able to quickly complete their P1 interviews and secure their visas at the U.S. consulate in Seoul, but for our Chinese players who couldn’t travel to Seoul (because they didn’t have visas), we had to find a third country: (a) that allowed Chinese travelers to enter and stay long enough to pass the requirement from U.S. immigration that forbid entry from anyone who had been in China for 14 days prior to entry, and (b) where the local U.S. consulate accepted applications for P1 interviews from foreign applicants. In our harried effort to secure visas, at one point we had players spread across 4 different countries. But then, less than 24 hours before getting on the plane to L.A., after we somehow managed to secure P1s for enough players to field a starting roster, after getting our hopes up that we could finally take the stage, the league made the decision to cancel the L.A. makeup matches. The league absolutely made the right decision, but … F#@%^#CK!

We’re not the only ones to have gone through any of this, as the other Chinese teams have gone through similar levels of suck.

We still have lots of work to do and problems to solve. We have several players/staff who just returned to China from their visa fishing expedition in Southeast Asia, and we need to find a way for them to join their teammates in Seoul. We’re still training out of a converted hotel meeting room. We haven’t received our swaggy Jeff Staple jerseys to wear. Our guys can’t get in their regular workouts, which have been a core part of our team activities. We will continue to work with the league to figure out how to manage the rest of the season’s schedule and logistics. And we need to continue to be vigilant about our players’ health and safety even as the curve has seemingly flattened in this part of the world.

But for now, it’s enough that our guys get to play tomorrow. Truth be told it doesn’t matter to me how we do this weekend, it’s enough that our team has stayed together through unprecedented adversity to even get to play. It’s enough that we finally get to do what we all love and came here for, and that’s to cheer our best 6 against the other side’s best 6.

Time to pop off let’s go!

Thanks for reading.