Back in May, Vytis Lasaitis, head coach of the Overwatch League’s Florida Mayhem, took a temporary break from his duties, citing his personal well-being. “OWL is a frantic marathon,” he wrote. “While it’s mostly an exhilarating journey, it also pushes all competitors to the limit and brings a heavy burden. Figuratively speaking, I’ve had to wear a lot of different hats since the regular season began, and it has now caught up to me. I’ve been experiencing burnout and various health issues since stage two, but it’s something I chose to neglect for a long time.”

Lasaitis wasn’t the only one. Other players and teams suffered from the league’s demanding 40-match schedule, which saw clubs play two games every week with little room for restorative breaks. The Shanghai Dragons notoriously spent 15 hours a day practicing in search of their first win, while New York Excelsior star Kim “Pine” Do-hyeon missed 10 games midseason due to a panic attack. When Nate Nanzer, the league’s commissioner, started talking to players and staff after the first season wrapped, the intense schedule was the major point of concern. “The feedback we got universally was that the players felt like they needed more breaks,” Nanzer explains. “They needed more opportunities throughout the season to take a couple of days off.”

“Players felt like they needed more breaks.”

As OWL prepares for its upcoming second season, which kicks off on February 14th, it’s making a number of changes with player wellness in mind. Chief among them is a significantly shorter schedule: in 2019, each Overwatch League team will play a total of 28 regular season games, allowing for much more time off. Teams will have weeks when the only play a single match, and bye weeks where they don’t compete at all. “There’s going to be more breaks both from practicing and playing,” says Nanzer in an interview with The Verge. “Mental health and wellness is something that we take super seriously at the league.”

“There were definitely signs we could see that the mental fortitude of everyone waning towards the end of the season,” says Mike Schwartz, general manager of OWL’s Los Angeles Valiant. “The stress of grinding day in, day out was taking its toll.” Like an increasing number of e-sports teams, Valiant ownership group Immortals employs a director of player performance, Dr. Doug Gardner, to ensure its players are operating a high level physically and mentally.

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Gardner admits he’s a bit disappointed the season has been shortened so much. “I believe that more games allow teams to create separation between the good and bad,” he says. But he admits that it will have benefits for the players and team as a whole. “The longer breaks and less stages will allow teams to balance and prioritize recovery and practice, without sacrificing one for the other,” he says.

Right now, all OWL games are played out of Blizzard’s e-sports arena in Burbank, California, but the ultimate goal for the league is for teams to play out of their respective cities, much like a traditional sports league. This will further complicate scheduling, especially considering OWL is a global league, with clubs spread across six countries in North America, Europe, and Asia. As the league expands, it’s doing so with an eye toward geographic parity in order to make that eventual travel easier on players. OWL started out with 12 teams, and it’s adding eight more for season 2, including Paris, Washington, Toronto, Vancouver, Atlanta, and three new clubs in China. (Blizzard announced the first of these new teams just days after season 1 wrapped.)

“We don’t have a lot of history.”

“Pretty much all we think about in the office these days is figuring out the operational complexity of operating a home-and-away e-sports league,” Nanzer says. “So having regional concentrations of teams is definitely important for that.” This shift to a home-and-away format — which doesn’t yet have a firm date — will mean even more tweaking of the schedule, which is something OWL might just be ideally suited for. “One of the benefits that we have as a startup league is we don’t have a lot of history, or any history, that says we must do things a certain way because we’ve done it that way for 80 years or whatever,” explains Nanzer. “So that’s kind of a cool place to start from.”

Eventually, the league plans to grow as big as 28 teams, though there are no details yet on when to expect further expansion. Nanzer says future growth will be focused on Europe, as London and Paris are currently the only two European clubs. But he also has an eye on making the league even more global than it currently is. “Over time, you could see a world where we could have a team in Latin America, you could see a world where we have a team in Southeast Asia or Australia, you could see a world where we have a team in the Middle East,” Nanzer says. “Over time, as those markets continue to develop, not just as e-sports markets but as gaming markets, I think those are definitely markets that we’ll explore.”

Back in February, the Shanghai Dragons made headlines when they signed Kim “Geguri” Se-Yeon, the league’s first female player, who instantly became one of the most prominent women in e-sports. She remains the only woman on an OWL roster, but there are small signs that league is slowly continuing to diversify. For instance, the upcoming Washington team made Molly “Avalla” Kim the first female coach in OWL when they signed her in September.

“This is a normal thing.”

According to Nanzer, these kinds of hirings are something he sees occurring more in the future, particularly as the league expands and more opportunities arise. “I think that it’s only natural as competitive gaming and e-sports becomes bigger and bigger, and there are more opportunities, you’re going to see more and more people from more diverse backgrounds,” he explains. “At the league office, almost half of our team is female. I think this is a normal thing that’s only going to become more and more normal in the years to come.”

For now, though, the focus is on preparing for the impending second season, as well as gearing up for the league’s ambitious future beyond that. There are a lot of professional sports and e-sports leagues, but Nanzer believes that it’s the global nature of OWL that will eventually make it distinct. “There is no sports league where Shanghai is going to play against Paris in the regular season,” he says. “That just doesn’t exist.”