Team Netherlands, Overwatch WorldCup 2019 and BlizzCon experiences

Team Netherlands, Overwatch WorldCup 2019 and BlizzCon





Team Netherlands started out scrimming earlier than most teams because the contenders season ended before OWL and none of our players had to attend gauntlet.





For the first few weeks of scrimming, I wasn't able to attend scrims as much as I wanted to, as I was still helping out the Reign in our playoff run. So, I want to give a big shoutout to @DavidStrid_OW who helped the team in my absence and recorded vods which I would later rewatch.





After the OWL season, I started being more involved with the team, holding vod reviews multiple times a week, doing 1 on 1 sessions with the players (which David and I were both doing) and leading the team through scrims.





As Blizzcon approached, I made sure our strategy and player lineups were set.





A little on how we utilized both A10 and Jona:



I felt both players were insanely skilled in the hitscan role. A10 is very good at making plays and making his team play around him. This was perfect for koth where most fights are decided by mechanics and ult economy. In scrims we ended up having a 70% win rate on koth with this A10 koth specialist shift.





Jona has a completely different playstyle from A10. He will make more plans around the team and sacrifice himself more so other players can show off their talents. Him being an extremely vocal voice in target calling and plan-making made him perfect for payload, hybrid and 2cp modes. If anything weird was pulled out on these maps, he also had a bit more experience and a wider hero pool.





Overall, team Netherlands was extremely strong in scrims against other European teams. This gave us a lot of the much needed confidence going into Blizzcon, as the players weren't as experienced as some of the players on other teams due to some having never competed at a LAN.





Preliminary maps were decided weeks before Blizzcon and since we had to fight through these our last few weeks of Blizzcon were playing these maps 90% of the time.





At Blizzcon:



Team Netherlands got to L.A. early on the 27th because of our sponsors. This gave us a big advantage over other teams who arrived on the 29th. We had 2 more days to get rid of our jetlag and we spent 2 days scrimming at an internet cafe close to Anaheim.





In the preliminaries, we faced Saudi Arabia first, which we didn’t expect because the seeding shifted the day before. Luckily, we had scrimmed them, so David and I rewatched their vods and I informed our players on how we expected them to play and that if we played our own game we would shine. Match came and we took it with a 3-1 score. Team Saudi Arabia played very well and could have surprised many teams had they been in a different group.





Our second match was team Finland, the team we had prepared for most. We played them on the maps we knew how to play best. The scoreline might have been 3-0 but the match was really close and could have gone either way.





We ended up 1-2 in prelims, tied with team Russia, and had to win against them to proceed to group stage. This match vs Russia ended up being one of my proudest moments at Blizzcon. We quickly went over how they played and the entire team was convinced that if we threw in all our energy into that match we would succeed. The team came out screaming in that match with so much energy and dominated team Russia in the first 2 maps. We often joked that we played best with our backs against the wall and it showed up here big time. The team played so extremely well in that match, even though they had played 3 long matches before this because they all were really hungry for that group stage.





In group stage we got placed in group B. We knew as soon as we got seeded here we had a shot. We spent the night reviewing our matches and fixing our mistakes. We'd have to play almost every map in the group stages, so, for me, it was all about fundamentals. We couldn't possibly prepare for every map.





We went home early right after our Russia match to prepare against team France. The map pool really didn’t favor us but we were going to give it our all. We went over their Bastion compositions extensively. How we were going to do what on what map. We lost Lijiang which is a map we really needed to win as koth was our best mode but didn't lose hope and struck back on Blizzard World because we had prepared so well vs the french Bastion strats.





Then, on Junkertown, something I had not prepared for happened. SoOn stayed in spawn and as soon as we rolled out Pharah he swapped to Widow on defense. We tried to counter with double sniper but SoOn popped off and we got rolled.





After this, we decided that against SoOn we did not want to take the Widow matchup. We'd continue playing Mei/Reaper and win through teamplay. On Volskaya, we had to make sure our pathing was really clean and we forced brawls. Our defense played extremely well and we held on 2nd point. Then on our attack we knew they would play Widow/Pharah. Pregame we made the plan to rotate together. Force the Widow and Pharah on 1 angle and roll over tanks. In the match, we could not get this done, SoOn kept taking off-angles and kept picking us as we walked in. In this high pressure situation, our inexperience was the most obvious and I deeply regret not going over the plan on attack more with the players.





Working with all the players on team Netherlands was outstanding. They're all so motivated and would spend multiple hours after scrims were over discussing that days scrims. They regularly came up with new ideas and plays, which were often very good. They wanted to be involved with the development of our team, they weren’t here to just play, and their drive gives them each a lot of potential in their future careers.





In the end, my experience at and before Blizzcon was amazing. The team atmosphere was one of the best I’ve ever seen and all the players were so hungry and wanted to be coached. Seeing my team play on stage made any obstacles worth it.





This ended up extremely long and if you are still here, thank you for reading. I want to thank all the players and staff for working so hard with me as their coach. I can't wait to see where all the players from team Netherlands go.









TL;DR My experience throughout the OWWC was wonderful. The players on Team Netherlands really showed their ambition to perform well throughout the entire process, and that shone through on stage at Blizzcon. Although there were things I wish I could have changed about our match against Team France, it was a great experience to work with and for this team. I’m honored to have been chosen as head coach for Team Netherlands 2019, and I cannot wait to see where everyone involved goes from here.









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