When you’ve already cemented yourselves as a good competitive team, winning the first-ever X Games Gold Medal for gaming , how do you improve upon that success? For OpTic Gaming , a month-long trip to the Red Bull High Performance Boot Camp helped to push them from good to great.

Embedded above, you can watch the first episode of Behind the Green Wall, our four-part series on OpTic Gaming’s experience in the Red Bull High Performance Boot Camp. Here’s how it all went down.

Only the Beginning

When you look at how far eSports has come over the last few years, it’s hard not to be impressed by the exponential growth. OpTic Gaming won 2010’s Call of Duty XP event, the first million dollar tournament Call of Duty had ever seen. Since then, there’s been two other million dollar tournaments – Call of Duty Championships – and OpTic Gaming has placed top three in both.

“You gotta put the pieces together and really understand and see where this is going,” says Matt ‘NaDeSHoT’ Haag, Red Bull Athlete and captain of OpTic Gaming. “I think a lot of people who don’t get on board now are going to be surprised where it takes off to in the next couple years.”

After placing fourth at UMG Dallas, Haag and the rest of OpTic Gaming – Seth “Scumpii” Abner, James “Clayster” Eubanks , and Jordan “Proofy” Cannon – start their training at the Red Bull High Performance Boot Camp.

They begin with instruction from Philip Folson of Fulcrum Adventures as he educates them about what they hope to achieve with the day’s activity: the High Ropes Course. He shares that there’s three important components to any team: people, process, and performance. Theoretically, strengthening these aspects should help them perform better as a team.

“Any team can survive when you guys are winning,” says Philip Folson, “When you’re not winning and things are hard, that’s when this pays off.”

Once they understood what they were hoping to accomplish, OpTic set out to conquer the ropes course, pushing themselves both individually and as a team to get through the course. It was a challenge, as it’s meant to be, but they made it through in one piece, and came out stronger because of it.

“We did it with the entire team so it was a great experience in that sense,” says NaDeSHoT. “We got to have a lot of fun…lots of bonding, so it was great for team chemistry.”

In the next episode of Behind the Green Wall, OpTic Gaming continues their High Performance training in the Red Bull eSports studio and High Performance space as they work to push themselves to the next level.

Check back on November 17th, 2014 for the second episode of OpTic Gaming: Behind the Green Wall.