Hello everyone,

First of all I want to say how grateful I am to get to work as Team UK's Head Coach once again this year. It's an honour and we're going to make sure we exceed last year's performance.

For the trial process we set the bar to apply at 4500+ SR the past two seasons. During these trials, we ran a combination of 2/2/2 and GOATS: we wanted to test players' current knowledge on their role as well as putting them in difficult situations which they might not have dealt with before to see how they adapted. We had 33 players trialing in total of which we judged on a multitude of factors, raw skill/mechanics, flexibility, game IQ, team cohesion, communication and mental fortitude. The coaches involved in the trialing process were primarily myself, ChrisTFer and Tanizhq.

Ultimately we'd come to our Final 7, Fusions, SMEX, Kyb, KSP, FunnyAstro, Kruise and Boombox. The majority of these players I have a strong relationship with and have worked with prior to this year, the only exception being FunnyAstro. We chose the best players who would mesh well together and compliment each other's strengths. We considered taking a 3rd in the damage role but it wasn't really necessary with how flexible both Kyb and KSP are, this lead us to considering the taking two Main Supports instead. We felt that FunnyAstro and Kruise were both very talented players and each proved to have different strengths that could compliment the team in different ways. Team UK is an opportunity to prove yourself in front of the world and we felt that Astro deserved that chance to play on such a big stage.

I'm sure many of you are wondering who the sub is on this 7 man roster: neither Kruise nor Astro is a substitute. Both of them will get playtime as we experiment in our scrims leading up to BlizzCon.

Thank you to everyone who applied for Team UK and every player who participated in trials. We are truly stacked this year and will show you the best Team UK can be. #LANimals #7Lions

- Hayes, Head Coach.