Part 6: Coach, Player, Mentor

Tim

Tell me about your coaching style in two sentences.

Boble

No one will ever outwork us. We give our full effort every time we're in the same room together.

Tim

Tell me more about your full effort.

Boble

What I mean by giving your full effort is to make sure that you're attentive at all times. Make sure that you're doing your job in-game at all times.

We joke with each other. We say that, wow, our brains turned off. We try to make sure that we limit those types of moments throughout the game because I really try to preach practice how you play. I really believe that the habits that you build during practice will translate into the game. If you're having a lot of these lapses in practice, it only makes sense that they're going to happen in the game.

Last year, I found that to be the case with the team that I was coaching. I'm trying really hard early in the season to hammer that into my players’ heads.

Tim

What does the perfect practice look like?

Boble

We start our day an hour earlier than most teams so we can watch VOD of the previous day to improve on specific things in the games we're about to play. Then we have our first scrimmage. Scrims right now usually last around 2 hours and 30 minutes.

We'll take a small 5 - 10-minute break after our first scrim. Jump right into the second one and then that's another two and a half hours. After that, we'll do another session of VOD if there's anything major that came up.

Then the players go off and play in their own pickup games or various online tournaments. They're constantly getting reps from a coaching staff perspective. While the players are doing that, we're analyzing the data to see how we performed across all the game modes.

I'll go ahead and watch the film that I'm going to watch with the guys tomorrow. I have bullet points we can go through, jump to this timestamp, look how we played that. We're trying to be as efficient as possible with our time.

Tim

Does your approach to strategy and practice change with a new iteration of the game?

Boble

It hasn't changed too much from last year. I have a wonderful analyst in JP who's allowing me to get all sorts of new data that I didn't have access to last year. We're still actively learning and building out things. While we have been practicing, we know that with the current state of the game, the practice isn't as good as it can be because of constraints within the game.

There are times in the game where enemy players are spawning on top of one another. Now in an ideal situation that's not the case. When we run into a scenario like that, it's hard to learn much from it because it's not something traditionally that we would expect.

Tim

How have your experiences coaching last year impacted your methods moving toward this season?

Boble

Last year was my first year coaching. It was really the first year within Call of Duty that coaches were part of every single team within the League. It was a learning space for everybody involved and ironing out some of the infrastructure on my end was huge.

I’m getting replays for the guys after maps so they can see some of their early mistakes and presenting data to the players in a way that makes sense. As well as managing our time and making sure that when we're watching film, we're actively paying attention and learning instead of just letting the time run down until the map ends.

A lot of it is just making sure that we're productive. Like I said earlier, I want to make sure that no team out there will ever outwork us. So that's just a part of the things I'm trying to implement earlier on with this team than I did in the past.

Tim

Can you talk about the difference between playing a new Call of Duty for the first time as a coach as opposed to a player?

Boble

The players jumped right in, they started playing tournaments, started playing their custom matches, and just diving right into a competitive environment. This time around I went to a custom match, the spectator mode, and I was just looking at all these little different features. Playing around with what my recordings might look like, what the game might look like, and just trying to see the outside things that as a player I don't really care about.

As a player, I don't care what a spectator looks at because I'm focused on my first-person point of view. How I'm playing. Thinking about it is weird, how my thinking has changed from release to release of Call of Duty games, but it's still a fun process. Every time a Call of Duty is released, it's like Christmas for us and everybody involved.

Tim

How has that experience being a pro player in prior games influenced your ability to coach?

Boble

It definitely gives me a lot of respect from some of the current players because they know that even though it was in the past, I've walked the walk. I think no matter if it's esports, or sports, a player would want their ideal coach to be somebody who has followed a similar path that they're currently following.

So we can give advice based on what's worked for us in our playing career and implement that into their regiment and practice schedule.