if the shoe fits: an interview with Sam ‘face’ Merewether, assistant coach with the Los Angeles Gladiators SHU Follow Nov 24, 2019 · 22 min read

Courtesy of Talon Esports

The Los Angeles Gladiators are one of two teams representing the LA region in the Overwatch League. Owned by the Kroenke family who also own and operate several sports franchises such as the Los Angeles Rams and the Denver Nuggets, the Gladiators have set some lofty goals moving into the third season of the Overwatch League.

The team came into the inaugural season back in 2018 with high expectations, fielding a mixture of Western and Korean talent with familiar names such as Bischu, Surefour and Hydration. Despite finishing 4th overall during the regular season, the team fell short during their playoff run, finishing 5th-6th alongside Boston Uprising. Moving into the 2019 season, the team opted to keep the core roster together but added some much needed depth to the team in the form of coveted Korean DPS player Decay as well as bolstering the tank line with the additions of rOar and Void. The Gladiators, along with the rest of the league, encountered some difficulties adjusting to a very oppressive tank-heavy meta. Despite this, they finished off the regular season at 5th place and once again found themselves exiting playoffs early.

While the first two Overwatch League seasons have undoubtedly cemented the Gladiators as a top team, the aggressive moves the franchise has completed thus far in the offseason clearly indicate that the organization is not content with simply reaching the playoffs every season. With the team parting ways with rOar, Hydration, Surefour and Decay — the Gladiators found themselves in a position to acquire some big names. Within the span of a few weeks, the team announced several new superstar acquisitions with talent such as OGE, Space and Birdring which were rounded off with the return of Bischu and the addition of budding flex DPS talent Mirror. Joining them are two incredibly talented, yet somewhat unknown coaches in CurryShot (previously with the Guangzhou Charge) and face (previously with Talon Esports).

face is one of the most decorated coaches to have traversed the Path to Pro system over the course of 3 years. Having multiple championships to his name as a coach across multiple regions, his addition to an already star studded roster solidifies the concerted push the Gladiators organization seems to be making towards a championship season. I had a chance to sit down with face following his addition to the team to discuss his time in Overwatch, his approach to coaching and how to tackle problems on mixed rosters.

1. You’ve been involved in Overwatch for the better part of 4 years, did you compete in any other titles prior?

Before Overwatch, I competed in Team Fortress 2 — I played a lot of TF2 in Australia at a competitive level. I’d say I was an average player at best, I was good at being a leader and working with my team but I wasn’t the most individually skilled player. I competed in a few seasons of Premier with teams like Los Pollos Hermanos and FIFO. It was a pretty tight knit community of players and some of the guys that I competed against transitioned to Overwatch as well such as ckm, Yuki and termo.

What role did you play in TF2?

I mainly played Medic but I also played Soldier and Scout briefly. I think I played Scout in a season of Premier but I probably shouldn’t have been there!

2. What was your life like before committing to Overwatch and esports as a full time career?

Prior to committing to Overwatch full time, I was a graphic designer for a very long time — basically my entire tenure in OW prior to coaching NRG, I was working simultaneously while coaching or playing on the side. When I was competing in TF2, I was in university studying graphic design.

Courtesy of Talon Esports

3. You’ve competed in a few different Overwatch teams as a player in the OCE region before making the transition to coaching, famously acquiring the ‘Best OCE Main Support of 2017’ award from your time on King’s Gaming Club. What prompted you to make the jump to coaching? How has your experience playing helped your approach to coaching?

For a long period of time, I always felt like I had a strong leadership presence in all the teams I competed on, I was essentially always the coach of the team. However, there wasn’t a lot of competition for the main support role in Australia at the time and I didn’t feel like I was an exceptionally skilled player. I had a pretty good awareness of where I stood in relation to other talented main supports and eventually reached the realization that my skill (or lack thereof) would be detrimental to my team’s performances moving forward. As soon as I realized that replacing myself with another main support would be the team’s best option, I stepped down and decided to transition to coaching.

Transitioning to coaching felt pretty natural since I was already leading my team in strategy discussions and reviews. I think if I was a better caller in-game with respect to reading situations and calling adjustments on the fly, I probably could have competed for longer but my skill set leaned towards having a strong strategic understanding of the game so moving to coaching made a lot of sense, at the time.

4. How have the people in your life reacted to your commitment to esports? Has that changed now that you’re committing full time and moving to another country?

Honestly, I feel like a lot of my friends, while they haven’t outwardly said so, have no idea what I’m doing or don’t really understand why I’m doing it but they’ve generally been very supportive and understanding. My direct family has definitely been more supportive of the two parties. With my family, it’s very much a ‘pursue what you love’ situation so they’re always going to be supportive of me as long as I’m doing something that I’m passionate about. It’s never gotten to the point where they think I’m messing up my life so it’s been good so far!

5. You’ve got a fairly storied past in Overwatch with the Sydney Drop Bears winning two seasons of Contenders back to back under your coaching. You then moved onto NRG where the team reached the playoffs in an incredibly competitive region with you as an assistant coach. Your final run in Contenders prior to the big leagues was with Talon in the PAC region where you guys blazed through the regular season without dropping a series before having a stellar showing at the Gauntlet at the end of the year. Is there a secret to success for your consistent results in a relatively volatile Path to Pro system?

There’s no real secret to success, if I’m being honest. For each team I’ve worked with, there have been a lot of different factors in play such as the talent of the players, the team environment and the competition/region. For the most part, and I know this is a weird thing to say, both Sydney Drop Bears and Talon had players who were miles ahead of their counterparts in their respective regions. At a Contenders level, that’s often enough to put you head and shoulders above the competition.

However, while we’ve always had incredibly talented players in relation to the region — we also worked really hard on making sure we were able to develop a strong understanding of the meta at the time. For example, on Talon — we had some aspects of the meta down incredibly well such as understanding when, where and how to take fights. I’d say we were better than most teams at the Gauntlet in that regard but unfortunately fell short in other aspects of our play during the tournament.

6. Having been involved with scouting across a variety of Contenders teams, what are some key traits that are vital for an aspiring player that coaches are usually looking for?

The first thing any coach should be looking at is mechanical prowess. You really can’t go anywhere without solid mechanics. However, really good practice habits and work ethic are also essential. It’s really important to constantly look for ways to improve outside of scrims — for example, you should be playing lots of ranked but it’s important you take it seriously. You shouldn’t just be playing 8 hours of ranked a day on your Masters smurf or playing off-roles for 4 hours a day — it’s important to get practice but it’s also important to get the right kind of practice.

Right, you should always look at ranked as a way to work on things that you might not have the time to do in scrims.

Yeah exactly, you need to be actively challenging yourself in ranked. Additionally, having an open mind and being engaged in thinking about the feedback that you receive from your team is incredibly important. If someone tells you to make an adjustment, you shouldn’t just mindlessly follow it — you need to sit down and think about how that adjustment can positively or negatively impact your play. I guess a good way to look at it is — if you’re a player, outside of exceptional mechanical prowess, you need to be constantly engaged in every aspect of your play. The biggest danger a player can face is getting complacent and going through the motions.

7. Having worked alongside a few coaches in my career, I’ve seen a variety of styles of feedback utilized in Overwatch. Something that stood out to me from working with NineK in the early days of NRG was using drills in a meaningful way. This is often something we used on Shock as well to prepare for teams that we didn’t have a lot of practice against or in preparation for teams that largely played off-meta compositions. What are your thoughts on utilizing drills in Overwatch?

I personally haven’t often utilized drills in coaching. I think drills are hard to accomplish effectively in Overwatch since so many situations throughout the course of a match are incredibly difficult to replicate. The only drills you can effectively practice are first fights or first point attacks/defenses. After that, it’s usually impossible to accurately replicate game states due to factors like positioning, death timings and ultimate economy.

And even if you do use drills often, there’s a hidden trade off there — could you practice 90% of the game playing normally or is it really important for you to get good at a specific scenario? There’s realistically only a few niche applications for practicing a set scenario repeatedly, for example, as you mentioned — if there’s a match you really need to win against a team for whom you’ve done some scouting and identified specific compositions and tendencies or if you’re against a team that favors off meta compositions against which you have limited practice.

At the end of the day, you want your team to be the best so your goal should really be to find holistic ways of improvement so your team can progress on all fronts, not just specific moments.

Courtesy of Talon Esports

8. Players are obviously human beings and some are incredibly young, especially in the T2/T3 level. In my experience, some players excel at being able to receive feedback and incorporate it immediately into their play while some require more attention. Is this something you’ve experienced? How does one go about effectively delivering information and feedback to different players with different needs?

For me, the most important thing to acknowledge in coaching is that every player is different. Yelling at some people is really bad but yelling at others is really good, similar to athletics or any other competitive environment. Every player needs a different approach and that’s what really makes coaching difficult. You need to have an intimate understanding of your players and constantly be trying different ways to effectively deliver the same information to your team.

For some players, you almost have to trick them into believing that they’ve reached a solution or had an idea themselves but in reality — you’ve been sitting with them and guiding them to that conclusion every step of the way. For others, you can sometimes be incredibly blunt and just say ‘Hey, you need to adjust this aspect of your play’ or ‘Here’s what you need to start calling if we run into this situation again’ and just cut through the noise and deliver feedback that way. The players you can be blunt with are obviously great players to coach but there’s always a trade off. The person that you may have to spend a lot of time with in order to guide them to a solution may be more difficult to work with but might have an incredible amount of upside, if coached correctly.

And that’s one of your biggest responsibilities as a coach — understanding your team and being thoughtful in your approach so as not to undervalue players because the perception is that he or she is unteachable.

Yeah exactly. Just like it’s a player’s job to constantly find ways to improve their play, it’s your job as a coach to find effective ways to teach players that struggle with traditional forms of feedback.

9. We’ve seen Blizzard makes a lot of beneficial changes for the competitive community over the past year, most notably with the implementation of the Replay Viewer. Conversely, there has been a notable lack of data tools widely available at the Contenders level outside of discontinued tools such as Winston’s Lab. What are your thoughts on the role analytics can play at a Contenders level? Is the lack of data support hindering the scene?

The replay viewer is phenomenal for scrims. It’s an insane improvement from how things used to work. In Talon, in between maps, we were able to go to exact moments of the map prior that we wanted to discuss and it streamlined the feedback process by leaps and bounds. It’s so much more efficient than using a grainy VOD that you need to wait for YouTube to finish processing.

And trying to figure out cooldown usage using VODs was usually a nightmare.

Yeah, trying to figure out which 3 blue pixels represented which player/hero was also a nightmare. The replay viewer is definitely an incredible tool that will have a long lasting impact on how players and teams can improve. It’s just a much faster way of accessing the same information and it’s a lot easier to hold your players accountable, as a result.

While I don’t think getting access to match data at a Contenders level would have as large an impact, I think it would definitely help teams and players find new ways to improve. One of the biggest uses for data as a tool is to show progress. Currently, at the Contenders level, the only way to inform a player of their progress is verbally. While that’s definitely acceptable, there’s so much more weight in your words if you can show them the numbers and say ‘Hey, we worked on this and this statistical increase in your performance represents that’. I think showing progress is a really important aspect of coaching since it really helps highlight the value in what players and coaches are doing and stats are a really good way to help you do that.

That’s something that can help you with players that need alternate methods of coaching as well, going back to our previous discussion. I had a few requests on Shock where I would need to look up specific stats, sliced in some relatively obscure ways since it would help the coaches drive a point home.

Yeah I agree, having the ability to use a multi-faceted approach is really important. You can use verbal feedback, vision and statistical analysis really well in combination for players that might require more attention. I can sit down with a player and say ‘Hey, this player is accomplishing X or Y better — here’s a VOD of them doing it and here’s what that equates to in the data’. And you can go through the process again by showing them the end result of them applying your feedback to their own play which can really help drive the point home.

Courtesy of Talon Esports

10. You’ve obviously competed in a wide variety of teams with a lot of different coaches and analysts. What are some of the pitfalls you’ve experienced in your path to pro?

I think complacency is the biggest danger for coaches. Coaching is a job where you can’t afford to fall behind and just go through the motions. You need to have an attitude like your players where you need to be constantly grinding and looking for ways to improve your understanding of the game. As soon as you get comfortable and passive, you start to fall behind. Esports is an incredibly competitive industry so it’s important to stay motivated and ambitious — the industry moves too fast for you to slow down.

I think in general, going through the motions is a very common problem in the competitive Overwatch community. A lot of people will argue that they’re still working hard because they’re putting the hours in but you need to be active and engaged in everything you do. You should constantly be striving for more — you need to be able to look back in a month, 3 months or 6 months and see yourself making measurable progress.

11. What are you excited for the most moving into your debut season in the league?

This is a little corny but I’m really excited to move up and work with a team at the highest level of competition. The thing I’m looking forward to the most is probably learning more and growing as a coach.

That’s not corny!

It’s a little corny! But really, Gladiators are a better team than I’ve ever worked with — there are better players, staff, infrastructure and we’ll be competing against the best players and teams as well. This is really the best opportunity I could hope for as a coach. The whole reason anyone is in esports is to improve and grow so taking the next step is always incredibly exciting.

Courtesy of Talon Esports

12. How important is the Path to Pro for the future of the league? What are some of the ways you’d like to see Blizzard additionally support the T2 scene?

I’d say that the Path to Pro is arguably as important as OWL. If we want to see the league find sustained success, the Path to Pro needs to receive a consistent amount of attention from Blizzard and the community. It’s really the basis for everything for the league. From a pure numbers perspective, it has a huge reach — it has more players than OWL, encompasses a wide variety of regions and has a much lower barrier to entry than the league. I think Contenders is the product that Blizzard really needs to focus on promoting more — everyone should aspire to play in Contenders as a stepping stone to working towards the league — and the only way that happens is if Blizzard is able to market Contenders as an attractive product where the community looks at the Path to Pro as fun, engaging, competitive and worth grinding.

Outside of purely player facing financial incentives, I think they also need to relax the third-party sponsorship requirements for Contenders so non-Academy teams can gain some financial support. Right now, there aren’t really any meaningful sponsorships in the Path to Pro because of how restrictive the rule set is and this is definitely doing more harm than good at a T2 level.

Blizzard can also look to add in-game incentives, similar to TF2 or CS:GO. In TF2, we had badges that you could wear in game that would commemorate your participation or performance in big events like Ozfortress, UGC or ETF2L. If you were in a ranked game and you inspected that player, you could go through all their accolades which was a pretty cool feature. I think something along those lines would definitely work really well for OWL and Contenders with different models and cosmetic setups. While it seems like a pretty minor change, I think it really helps incentivize Contenders and helps make events like the Showdown and Gauntlet memorable, outside of their obvious benefits to players and teams. In-game cosmetics would also help promote the game in pubs — any player can inspect you and see a cosmetic that’s only achievable via competing in the Path to Pro. I know it sounds stupid and one might argue that people don’t play for little mementos like that but they really do — and we’ve seen this work across a multitude of premier esports titles.

And finally, I’d love to see more events like the Showdown and the Gauntlet. They were both amazing events and really represented what Contenders and the Path to Pro are all about. Seeing the best from each region compete against each other is really important for the health of the game. Talon didn’t end up winning but for the longest time the narrative was that Talon was successful in an incredibly weak region — but at these events, we got the opportunity to show the world that we could hold our own against some of the top teams from around the world. PAC, OCE and SA are definitely fringe regions in the greater context of the game and events like Gauntlet really help some of the top talent from those regions shine.

These events do a great job of bringing in new fans as well. If you’re purely a Dallas Fuel fan, for example, and you’ve never really paid attention to Contenders outside of Envy — watching Envy during events like the Showdown and Gauntlet might help you discover more talented players and teams to follow.

Yeah, absolutely. You get to see more teams and more players and it really helps bring a broader perspective of the competition and the game to fans.

Courtesy of Talon Esports

13. Patiphan was a standout player during the Gauntlet and the future is certainly bright. What was working with him like and where do you see him go from here?

Pati is an incredibly talented young player but he’s definitely got a lot of things he can work on to really reach the next level. If he’s able to figure out some of the things that’ll help him become a mainstay in the competitive scene, it’s genuinely scary how good he can become and how good he can make the players around him.

14. While you were involved unofficially with the Australian World Cup team last year, this was your first year officially working with them as a coach. What was your World Cup experience like this year?

Even though Australia had a pretty disappointing performance this year, World Cup was an incredibly fun event to attend. Blizzcon and World Cup were overall amazing events and I think it really encapsulates what competitive Overwatch is about in a broader sense. Every LAN you go to has a similar feeling — people from all over the world with varying backgrounds who all share a common interest coming together for a common goal. You might have played ranked with or against some of these players often over the last year but they live in another country and now you get to finally meet them and compete against them on stage and work towards your dreams — it’s a really special feeling and I think these types of experiences are incredibly valuable for communities.

Courtesy of ORDER esports

15. Who are some of the OCE players that you’re excited to see compete in the future?

I think someone that immediately comes to mind is punk. He’s someone I feel doesn’t get as much attention as he deserves — he’s a really underrated offtank with a lot of potential. He’s an incredibly consistent player with good comms and a great attitude.

I also think Unter is an incredibly promising player. People might think he’s a bit of a troll but he’s a really strong leader, good caller and he works really hard. I think all the attributes that people look for in competent main supports — Unter possesses. Overall, a really undervalued player.

Going back to your earlier point of being engaged and constantly working to improve yourself — he seems to be consistently consuming a large amount of Overwatch at all levels to improve his understanding of the game, judging from his streams.

He’s definitely on the ball in terms of his work ethic and he’s reaping the rewards for it. Not just by being selected for the World Cup team this year and Order’s success in Contenders but from a pure improvement standpoint as well — he’s gotten better by leaps and bounds this year. If you asked me this question 6 months ago, he probably wouldn’t even be in the conversation but he’s developed himself to the point where it’s fair for me to say that he’s without doubt the best main support Australia’s ever had.

Adam on ORDER is another player that has a lot of potential to make it to the big leagues. He won’t be 18 till 2021 I believe but he’s got a lot of upside as a player. I think he just needs to figure out what steps he wants to take next but he has the necessary skills to perform at a top level. Another player with a great attitude and strong communication skills.

16. We’ve seen the game undergo a lot of different metas over the past three years and you’ve experienced them as a player and a coach. A common complaint over the last year and a half (especially with the prevalence of GOATs) has been how stale the metas have been. What are your thoughts on game balancing and what the developer team can do to combat player concerns?

I think being consistent with patch cycles is probably the best solution to this. Right now, it feels like the developer team is chasing their idea of a perfect Overwatch and they’re constantly making small changes and tinkering with the game over the course of many months and many patches to try reach the perfect game. However, I don’t think the perfect Overwatch exists — the way players and coaches approach new metas pretty much ensures it doesn’t exist. Players and coaches will always work out the simplest, easiest and most effective way to win and they’ll grind it into the ground and while people might not like that iteration of the game, they’ll follow it since it’s the best way to win. Usually, I’ve found that people really enjoy the freedom that comes when the game is in between two metas but those time periods never last long due to the nature of competition. I think if Blizzard just sat down and said ‘Hey, we’re going to have x amount of patches a year following this patch cycle and each patch will drastically alter the game’, the player base would probably find that a lot more appealing and it would help combat things like meta and viewer fatigue.

17. Having been a main support in the past, what are you looking for in a competent main support? In the current state of the game, should main support players still be undertaking the bulk of the in-game calling?

I think that really depends on what the team has and what the team needs. I don’t think it’s necessarily as black and white as people paint it to be — a lot of times, teams have this idea that the main support HAS to be the main caller doing everything from the macro to micro calling. In many cases, however, the reason that seems to be prevalent is because of the type of players that are attracted to playing main support competitively. If you have a really mechanically gifted main support that struggles with doing extensive calling outside of the usual macro, it definitely makes sense for the team to play around him and assist with calling. With how the game has developed, I don’t think it’s important that your main support HAS to be a big part of your leadership but given the nature of the role, they seem to fall into that responsibility frequently.

18. Something we’ve seen in the league is coaches seemingly favoring relatively polarizing styles of play with teams like the Titans favoring incredibly aggressive play and teams like NYXL favoring famously reactive play. What are your thoughts on these approaches to the game?

From my perspective, Overwatch has pretty consistently favored teams that are more aggressive across a multitude of metas. Every meta, teams that favored reactive and largely passive play styles usually ended up getting punished by the more aggressive team. I know that’s a really broad thing to say but from a coaching perspective, if you’re teaching your team to be fast and aggressive, it’s much easier to scale that back and figure out what constitutes over-aggression rather than starting off incredibly passive and trying to learn to scale up. A good example is dive — good teams in dive were consistently able to set up and execute efficient dives off the back of strong positioning. This same logic follows through with GOATs and also the current Reaper/Doomfist meta as well.

19. You’ve worked with a few diverse teams in your career — how can teams effectively manage rosters on mixed teams at the OWL level?

The most important issue to tackle on mixed teams is usually communication. Sorting that out is an absolute priority — not just in game between players but out of game when tackling feedback, review and strategy sessions as well. It’s important to ensure that everyone is on the same page and that we’re able to solve any misunderstandings quickly. Generally, this increases the coaching workload significantly since even if you can rely on a translator, you need to try break down feedback into simple steps that make sense within the context of the game. A simple way to ensure that everyone is on the same page is to get players that don’t speak English as a first language to explain the feedback back to you — a lot of times players will just follow along during feedback sessions without necessarily understanding the intricacies of what was covered. Getting players to explain it back to you may stress their English skills out but it’s for a positive goal — you don’t always need to do this but sometimes it’s pretty helpful.

20. The Gladiators have an exciting DPS duo announced so far in Birdring and Mirror. Birdring brings with him a wealth of T1 experience and was probably one of the more coveted DPS players available during this offseason. Conversely, Mirror is a younger player with experience in Contenders but someone that has considerable upside. Talk to me about what a player like Mirror brings on the team for those unfamiliar with his career.

A trait about Mirror that a lot of people are generally unaware of is his creativity as a player. He’s also an incredibly strong in-game leader — He’s similar to Sinatraa and Patiphan in that respect where you can see all three of these players leading their teams, making plays and calling in a way that ensures the whole team is invested. A lot of players get stuck in poor communication habits of just calling what they see in front of them but players like Sinatraa and Mirror call in a way that brings the whole team together for a common goal — I think that’s an incredibly valuable trait in Overwatch, one of the most exciting things about Mirror and something that I think will help in a mixed team environment greatly.

21. Final question, how big of a role did Unter shaving his mustache play in Australia’s World Cup performance this year?

It’s the sole reason why we lost!

You can find Sam on Twitter here!