Class is in session as academy project Team Välfärd forms

The Western Overwatch scene has seen an abundance of roster moves throughout the past few weeks, with players transferring all over as teams work on making the best roster.

Amidst all the shuffling, a new team is forming in the Nordics, and they have a unique goal in mind: to teach and give insight from the top level of professional Overwatch.

Team Välfärd is a new project collaborated by the Swedish Overwatch scene. Their plan as a team is to educate the community with their wealth of experience in the form of content, such as POV scrimmage streams, VOD and map reviews, discussions, and much more.

Presenting, your teachers!



Educational Stream Team Välfärd



We will be LIVE and streaming our scrims in 1 hour from now!



19:00 / 7pm CET pic.twitter.com/5lGusMjsg7 — Lucas Håkansson (C9) (@Mendokusaii) April 28, 2017

The new Swedish team mostly consists of players that have been recently benched from their teams. The DPS and tank duo of Mendokusaii and ryb will be joining the team from Cloud9, after the two were moved to the subs position by C9 in favor of their new Korean players. While ryb remained inactive up until this point, Mendokusaii recently subbed in for NRG for April's Overwatch Monthly Melee and the Rivalcade Rumble.

Support players Vonethil and Zave will be the teams support duo, with the two being benched by Fnatic and Misfits respectively just over a week ago. Capping off the roster is former böda socken DPS player kangakanga, and flex player Overpowered, the only player on Team Välfärd that has not been on a team.

Team Välfärd will also be joined by a welfare of support staff to help them along with the project. Former Splyce player flame will be joining as a coach/analyst, who has since made a reputation as one of the top analysts in the scene. Former Misfits coach Peak will also be joining, reuniting with his old teammate Zave on Team Välfärd. Rounding out the coaching staff is harsha, the coach of UCLA’s Overwatch team and journalist for over.gg.

Video content for Team Välfärd will also be produced by video editor ItsGamerDoc, who currently creates content for Mendokusaii.

To get some insight on the new project, we sat down with Team Välfärd coach harsha on the team’s formation and their future plans.

What was the idea behind forming Team Välfärd? harsha: Basically the main reason is that all the players on the team are currently in a sort of downtime until OWL actually comes around, and they thought it would be good to a) make sure their skills are fresh while they're free agents, b) make educational content for others looking to play with teams, and c) build a bigger social media and stream presence. How will you be helping the team as a coach? h: So the main goal of the project is to provide educational content, so I've been going through with VOD reviews and comms reviews from my own channel while helping with callouts and map walkthroughs for the team. Will this be a long term project? h: So obviously we can't guarantee when people will come and go given players might get a really good offer, but I imagine it will last for a sizable timeframe. Original idea is to do this until Overwatch League happens, but it's hard to plan out such a long timeframe! What teams does Team Välfärd plan to scrim against? h: Right now we're scrimming some more amateur/tier 3 teams, although we played vs kryws’ team yesterday. We plan to work our way up basically. Of course, every team we play has to be ok with letting us upload VODs and streaming! Are players like Mendo and Ryb (who are on C9 as subs) still on contract with the org? h: Mendo, ryb, Vonethil, and Zave are all contracted still as far as I know. Does the team plan on attempting to qualify for offline tournaments (i.e. TakeOver 2)? h: Not sure on that at the moment but it's definitely not out of the realm of possibility. We plan to play in weekly online cups and if the team does get to a level where they can be competitive, I imagine qualifiers for offline events are not out of the question. Will the team look for any sponsors or orgs to support the team? h: At the moment we won't be reaching out, and all earnings from tournaments are going to either get donated to EU tournaments or to a viewer-selected charity. Is there anything else you would to like to say to the community? h: I'm excited to see the team grow alongside the rest of the community and I hope people enjoy watching the process! Alright, thank you very much for the interview! And good luck with the project! h: No problem, and thanks!

The newly formed Team Välfärd is: