Since the beginning of the Overwatch League, I’ve spoken to Scott “Custa” Kennedy a handful of times in a handful of countries, from Los Angeles to Bangkok to Melbourne, Australia, just a few hours from his hometown of Adelaide. Both being Australia, there’s a kind of kinship we share being fish out of water in America.

“All the time,” says Custa when I ask if he still get moments where Americans don’t understand a wacky piece of Australian slang. “It happens less as I’ve started saying them less, as time goes on, but every now and then I say something and everyone looks at me really weirdly and I’m like, ‘what do you mean, this is not a normal thing?'”

“It’s just something different. And that’s what the team needs – it doesn’t always need a better player, it just needs to be something different so that the team could rebuild.” – Custa on the Valiant’s recent roster changes

A classic example is the Australian saying “crack open the boot,” which is just a way of asking someone to open a car’s trunk. “I had one recently where I said to a friend, ‘Oh you can fang it down the road,’ which I didn’t realise was an Australian thing. But apparently it’s a really Australian thing and he was like, ‘What do you mean – fang it?'”

The saying just means to drive really fast down a road. I told Custa a similar story where I tried to explain the Australian saying ‘I’m not here to fuck spiders’ to fellow esports journalist Adam, from Akshon Esports. The saying is just a similar way of saying, ‘is the pope catholic?’ but Custa and I shared a laugh over how there’s no logical explanation for how the phrase came to be. “It’s like ‘I wish I had an answer for you but it is what it is’,” said Custa, laughing.

Custa has been living in Los Angeles for almost two years now, and living away from his hometown of Adelaide for much longer. “The weather is nice,” he muses. “It’s never weather where you’re like, ‘I can’t go outside today’ or ‘this ruins my plans.’ Sometimes it rains really badly, but even then it’s nothing like Adelaide, right?”

It’s not all positive though. “The traffic and the sheer amount of people in one city is what gets to me the most. I enjoy Adelaide [where] it’s nice and open, one way roads on each side, everyone’s driving away fine. I went home last year, and I got to drive at home, and I was like, ‘this is wild, I get to go to a place far away and it only takes me 20 minutes.'”

Although Custa has adjusted to life in Los Angeles, his hometown team has struggled to keep up with the competition in the 2019 season of the Overwatch League. “It’s been a wild ride,” he says with a laugh, as I ask him to reflect on the season so far. “It’s just been one of those things that myself and the team have learned a lot from. It’s had its ups and downs, obviously [we were] really struggling in Stage One and personally I didn’t get to play.”

“It was just a lot of things just going wrong at once. And I’ve been through that before, with Dallas in season one, so it wasn’t something new to me. But I was coming into this season with really high expectations for the team, and for that to crumble was… But now we’re in a different project: building the team back up, proving that we deserve to be at the top.”

This new project, as Custa calls it, has seen some major roster changes to the team in Stage Three. Valiant veteran Pan-seung “Fate” Koo was traded to the Mayhem, in exchange for Mayhem Academy’s main tank and former Houston Outlaws player Russell “FCTFCTN” Campbell. The team also brought on Caleb“McGravy” McGarvey and Johannes “Shax” Nielsen.

The changes aren’t necessarily about upgrades or downgrades for the Valiant – they’re just something new. “I had been playing with Fate for about a year now, the other guys a lot more. FCTFCTN is someone I’ve played against a lot in my history of Overwatch. He played for Faze, so I’d meet him at a lot of LANs. I have a lot of respect for the guy. So getting to play with him has been really good.“

“It was just a lot of things just going wrong at once. And I’ve been through that before, with Dallas in season one, so it wasn’t something new to me.” – Custa on the Valiant’s struggles this season.

“He’s a really smart main tank, works well with the team. I wouldn’t even say either one is better – Fate of FCTFCTN – it’s just something different. And that’s what the team needs – it doesn’t always need a better player, it just needs to be something different so that the team could rebuild. I think a lot of our success [this stage] is sort of [because] when we brought in FCTFCTN and McGravy and Shax, we said ‘Okay, we’re starting again. We’re gonna learn how we want to play our game, throw everything out that we used to know.'”

For Custa, the whole first half of this season taught him and the team some important lessons. “The biggest thing that I learnt between season one and two is that winning does a really good job of covering up a lot of things that are either good or bad about teams. When you’re constantly winning, it doesn’t matter – everyone’s on a high. We made it to [season] playoffs, unfortunately [we] lost but we finished second in the regular season. So coming into this season, we thought everything was going to be dandy. But even when you’re succeeding, even when you’re doing well, you need to consistently keep trying to improve because it’s very easy to get complacent.”

If he could go back and give himself and the team some advice at the start of this season, it’s a very similar tone. “Don’t get complacent under the circumstances of assuming that everything from last season is just going to translate into this season,” he said. “We had high expectations coming into this season. We [thought we] could go top six, we can go top four, we can definitely accomplish this. Then coming in was such a big shock.”

Regardless of the first half of the season, the Valiant are looking to finish much starter than they started. They stand at 3-1 for the stage, with an eye on a potential Stage Playoffs run. One thing is definitely clear: with their new roster changes and fresh approach, the Los Angeles Valiant aren’t here to fuck spiders.

The Valiant go up against the Vancouver Titans later today. You can view the full Overwatch League schedule here.

This interview was conducted in Week Two of Stage Three, after the Valiant’s match against Guangzhou. Featured image by Robert Paul for Blizzard Entertainment.

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