By David Wise
My first season with the Brigham Young
University Collegiate StarLeague StarCraft II squad was quite
interesting. About a month or so into the season, our coordinator, Adam,
stepped down from the position as his schedule prevented him from
properly carrying out his duties to the team. He asked if anyone wanted
to volunteer for the position. I said yes. My first season in the CSL
and I found myself, an undergraduate student will little experience
managing people and even less experience in eSports, handling the duties
of a CSL coordinator.
Rough Starts, Reactive Planning
The first few days passed without
difficulty. I asked for people on the team Facebook group to commit to
play on Saturday as well as to give me their StarCraft II IDs and add
codes so I could send CSL the roster for Saturday. To those who
committed to play, I asked that they show up at least thirty minutes
early for registration purposes. That Saturday, a day that expanded my
perspective on the duties of a CSL coordinator, required strenuous
multitasking. Even with two monitors, I found keeping everything in line
difficult as I was communicating with my team in the StarCraft client,
team stragglers on Facebook, CSL admins on RaidCall, looking up and
adding players from the schools we were competing against from a huge
Google doc and e-mailing Alan, the match admin, our roster versus each
school (CSL requires coordinators to submit a roster before each series,
not just for the day). On top of this, one of our team members listed
his Battle.net ID instead of his StarCraft II ID which led to confusion
trying to set up his match until we finally resolved the problem.
Those weren’t the only difficulties that
Saturday. Our third round opponent, the University of Maryland College
Park, had run over into the time slot allotted into the third round.
UMCP ran thirty minutes behind schedule while two of our team members
needed to leave for work shortly. I found myself needing to be the “bad
guy” for the team, informing CSL admins of our opponents’ tardiness and
my teammates’ work schedule. I calmly but relentlessly kept contact with
both the opposing team’s coordinator as well as the CSL admins, hoping
to get our matches on the way or at the very least attempt to score the
forfeit win if they couldn’t start before our team members needed to
leave for work (about an hour after the start time for round 3).
Fortunately, Alan, the match admin, managed to start our matches on time
and we avoided the ugliness of forcing a forfeit. For me, this was
pretty difficult as I abhor confrontation and drama. However, a
coordinator’s responsibility sometimes requires speaking up in a calm,
professional manner in order to stand up for the team.
The frantic pace of gameday is hardly
the only challenge CSL coordinators face. Luis Conceicao, a graduate
student in the University of Ottawa’s Master’s of Criminology program,
described roadblocks with scheduling, “Some of us work and for those
that do it’s often hard to guarantee availability for match times.
Often, the matches can be rescheduled but this isn’t always the case and
is not always easy either. In these scenarios we try to find
alternatives but if that’s not possible we are stuck forfeiting our
match.” Recruitment also proved difficult for the Ottawa team, “This
year in particular though, I’ve had a hard time getting players. The
player base seems to be less active and we don’t have any high level
players. So this is leading into considerations between divisions one
and two amongst our team. While we don’t particularly want to get
stomped in division one, we don’t want to stomp in division two either.”
"...The CSL program can both be an outlet for college students to have fun or train up their level of play." (UMN Twin Cities/Glitch Gaming)
Sam Viesselman, a staff member for
Glitch Gaming and a University of Minnesota Twin Cities student studying
Biomedical Engineering, shed light on his struggles with team
management, “This is my first year as a coordinator and there are more
difficulties running a CSL team than I anticipated. The first is
recruiting both new players and keeping players from previous years.
Another tough thing is structuring a team. At the end of the day, we're
all doing CSL because we enjoy it, so forcing players to play practice
games and showing up to weekly practice can quickly suck the fun out of
program. Overall, it's been a learning experience trying to manage
people on all the same team with different goals, levels of dedication,
and aspirations.”
The Right Stuff
So what exactly constitutes a “good” CSL
coordinator? According to Viesselman, communication is key, “In my
opinion, a good coordinator will be very communicative with their team
and listen to his player's suggestions. As I previously mentioned the
CSL program can both be an outlet for college students to have fun or
train up their level of play. It's important to structure your team in a
way that makes sense with the player's desires or you can cause a loss
of interest in your team quickly.” Conceicao’s response echoed
Viesselman’s sentiments, “In the end, I think motivating your players is
most important. I want to get them to practice together, and work on
new builds and game plans but due to time constraints, school, work,
life, etc. It’s not always easy. As a team we try to ensure players are
playing their preferred matchups if at all possible and get good maps
for the races/builds as well.”
When I reflect on my own performance as a
CSL coordinator, I feel the weight of failure regarding recruitment. I,
too, have seen the number of players willing to compete decrease,
whether due to an intense work/school schedule or graduation. I hope to
remedy this issue this season as BYU’s two best players from the
previous season have graduated. While this will not be easy, I am
confident that I will accomplish it given the right amount of time and
work.
We lost our third round series versus
UMCP that day 3-1 but it was a pretty good run considering we only had
one Masters player (Adam, our previous coordinator) on the roster that
day and we had advanced one round further than our rival school, the
University of Utah (to be fair, they have a better StarCraft team). We
reveled somewhat as we chatted in our team’s Facebook group. At that
moment, despite the struggles and responsibilities of my position, I
found great joy and pride in the small victory we had achieved as a
team.
David Wise (@wiselingsc2) is a writer for the CollegiateStarleague and a content contributor to the Blizzard WCS Portal.
David is also a proud member as well as captain for team QTLing.
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