My experience with Dante and addressing Gnja's twitlonger

Part 1

[Issues with Dante]

1.Roster

To begin with, Dante was created 2 days before practice OD started. The org wanted to have a team ready before practice OD, understandable but rushed. The tryouts which happened on the weekend before OD was scuffed as most players only had 1 block to show what they had to offer. Many prospects were also unable to attend the tryouts due to a Denver Lan happening on the same days. Many of the staff’s first choice picks opted to play for other teams, which left the staff no choice but to go with their secondary choices. It was unfortunate because there were talented and proven t3 players who were trialing already, but the staff opted to go with non-t3 players except for me. Admittedly, the staff lacked the awareness of the t3 talent pool prior to this team and should have consulted roster choices with people who are familiar with the scene. The inexperience showed in the first 2 weeks of scrims. As the team captain, I was frustrated with myself and honestly at times with my teammates as well for not being able to get the results I wanted. In my mind, if the same amount of resources and effort was put into experienced t3 players by the coaching staff, Dante would have made an insane playoff run this season, not to say that we couldn’t have done it with non-t3 players but its more likely with experienced players.



2. Rate of improvement

Scrims are for making mistakes and learning from them. We made A LOT of stupid mistakes which could be fixed through ladder. The inexperience in team play showed in the first week. We spent the first week essentially teaching basics to the players such as dying cart, listening and following a game plan, and basic communication sequences. After the first week, we improved rapidly, and we were able to make set players on every map because we put in an additional hour before scrims every day to review maps and practice engagements. However, this was not enough as we lost to teams we should’ve beat in the second week of practice OD. I went to talk to iostux about the roster after the second week of scrims and expressed my concerns with the roster. I personally wanted to rebuild the team and have a playoff capable roster because I felt like the progress was not fast enough. He simply told me to be patient and if players are still under performing, they would be replaced. This is 100% reasonable. If a player isn’t performing up to team’s standards, they are literally holding the team back. Which is why for the first 2 weeks, we grinded review and coaches worked hard on our weak links. I’ve never seen a team improve as fast as this one. We went from struggling against teams that weren’t even t3 to competing and winning maps against some of the top t3 teams this season within a month. Although there was improvement, it wasn’t enough for me. I decided by the end of the 4th week to leave the team if there was no immediate progression or change in roster. It honestly felt like a waste of time losing to the same mistakes we’ve been working on for weeks and the was very frustrating to deal with.



3. Coaching and communication between staff and players

I enjoyed iostux’s form of coaching. He is very straight forward and wont sugar coat things. This meant that we weren’t told what we wanted to hear; we were told what we needed to hear. For me that works well because it’s very clear what I need to do to improve. They never stressed the small mistakes that we were aware of and only focused on mistakes that players unconsciously made. There never a you’re wrong and I’m right moment with the coaching. We always discussed in detail about the mistakes and found middle ground to come up with a solution. Ult-tracking is something I’m actively working on and in this past month, I’ve improved significantly due to the drills I was given to do. I know the community memes on iostux and talks shit about this guy. What he’s proven to me is that he gets shit done. He doesn’t beat around the bush; he identifies a problem and comes up with the fastest way to fix it which often was drilling with the team and helping them to understand the core issues. However, he is extremely objective focused and fails to see from other people’s perspectives. When you talk to him, he only knows how to speak his language, its often black or white when dealing with him. He sometimes goes too far when trying to get his point across where he becomes toxic especially if it’s a reoccurring problem which there was a lot of on the team. A big problem for me with the team was communication between the staff and players. Staff rarely reached out to us for reviews but that wasn’t a big problem. Because if we reached out to the coaches, they would ALWAYS respond and work to schedule a session in. Personally, I haven’t done any reviews with the coaches but if you know me, I’m more used to just grinding vods myself on my free time. It just frustrated me to not know what direction the staff wanted to take the team after struggling for 3 weeks. As someone who performed relatively well on the team, I was neglected as they were more focused on the weak links within the team which I didn’t mind, but progression wasn’t up to standards. After a few weeks of hard work from the staff and players, the progress was not enough to justify some of the player’s spots.





Why did I join Dante?

I was practicing with Inked prior to joining Dante. And arguably Inked was the better team roster wise without any doubt. I was memed on by my old teammates and friends within the community for joining a worse team. So why did I leave a decent team to join a worse team?



1. Platform of Elo Hell

Working on content with Lemonkiwi was probably the most fun I’ve had within a team in a long while. I love to make educational content but never had the push or a platform to release it on.



2. Experienced coaching staff

You cannot deny the experience that iostux and the rest of the coaching staff accumulated in T2. I was curious to why they had that experience over other coaches. After 4 weeks I knew why. They were truly the hardest working staff that I ever worked with before. They were clear and concise with their explanations, yet they also left space for us to give our take on their points. When the team continued to struggle throughout immense effort from staff and players, I knew the team was going to fall apart due to inexperience and high expectations. I joined with the intent of learning from experienced coaches and to grow myself as a player.



TLDR Tryouts was scuffed and the roster was rushed, got off to a bad start. Although we improved overall, it wasn’t up to the team’s standard of making it to trials+. The staff decided to make roster changes after a month of practice.





[Part 2]

Gnja’s twitlonger



In this section, I’ll be addressing his twitlonger as I found that some key points with regards to Dante’s coaching paints a bad picture of what really happened behind the scenes. Just to clarify, I’ve asked everyone for their permission to SS and quote them for this write-up. I’ve also asked for every one of my teammate’s input on the situation prior to putting this out.



As I stated in paragraph 3 of Dante’s issues, “Staff rarely reached out to us for reviews but that wasn’t a big problem. Because if we reached out to the coaches, they would ALWAYS respond and work to schedule a session in.”, the person that had the least amount of attention from the coach was me. I was given the task to improve my ult tracking through a drill, that’s it. This wasn’t because I didn’t reach out to the coaches, but it was because they wanted to focus on the weak links within the team. Successful coaching means effort from both sides. This means constantly reaching out to coaches and reflecting on scrims with a growth mindset.

By far the biggest point was the lack of coaching. With the permission of the staff, I’m able to show you what our schedule was like for the last month on Dante.

Week 1 (Oct 13 - 19th): http://prntscr.com/ptxvqf

Week 2(Oct 20 - 26th): http://prntscr.com/ptxwxa

Week 3(Oct 27th - Nov 2nd): http://prntscr.com/ptxyem



It is true that Gnja only was able to get only 1 vod session with our coaches, but anyone who tried to reach out to coaches for a session would have gotten more than one. What is truly concerning is the fact that there were claims of the team only having 2 team reviews, when clearly there were 8(some were optional attendance) throughout the month of October. Players were also expected to vod review on their own. Not only that, we had sessions that weren’t even on the calendar, including one session where we spent 2 HOURS practicing Orisa halt + doomfist ult combo with the whole team in the lobby to replicate different scenarios. Although it was only once, we were also assigned to watch the finals of contenders gauntlet where everyone took notes and studied their role. From my perspective, we brought up many issues not only in team vod reviews, but mid-scrim as well over the span of 4 weeks. There is no excuse to be made. Our players had more than enough time and resources to improve not only individually but as a team.



At one point, the staff even brought in a mentality coach to better help everyone on the emotional level.



At the end of the day, the staff decided to remove 2 players off the roster due to poor progress which roster shuffles happens frequently in t3. The ss that were included in the other person’s twitlonger happened after they were going to be replaced, therefore coaches decided to not put anymore resources into those players. There was no changing that. Things should’ve been handled better but there no going back now.



Iostux is not the perfect coach and we are not the perfect team. Everyone has their own problems and people will deliver criticism differently. However, the community is misinformed on the things happening behind the scenes. I urge the community to really question the things they read when drama like this happens as there are always 2 sides of the story.









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