Renshiro: “The long term experience as a team won”
ROUNDS pushed their way through the Swiss stage with a dominant 3-0 score and the best Buchholz of any team.
This past weekend ROUNDS Rocket League managed an incredible feat, winning every series in the SSA Open 6 Swiss stage. Beating Astronic (3-1), Marine Region (3-2), and le passion (3-2), ROUNDS remained #1 in the overall standings of the entire list of teams, with a better Buchholz score than even the two giants of the region, Five Fears and Pioneers. We catched up with our veteran player Jesse “Renshiro” Rissanen and assistant coach Tanis “Spookii” Caltrider after their RLCS Swiss day had concluded.
Renshiro and Spookii, thoughts about the rather slow start in games 1-2 versus Astronic?
Renshiro: “New team, hard to know what to expect them to do. Zero scrims against any of the teams we played [in the Swiss stage], because they are all very new teams for this last Open. So we had to learn and see mid-series how each of the teams played and approached the game. This is why I nailed my 3-1 prediction for the stream, they managed to get that Game 1 win (1-0) in OT. So exactly what I was thinking for the prediction happened, by them being able to steal a game early on. Then of course the more these series went on, the more we learned and saw their playstyle together, then adapted and started slowly gaining control of the series. In the end the long term experience as a team won in these series.”
Spookii: “From a coaching perspective it’s about analyzing how they are adjusting and making a plan from that, Game 1 is fine to drop just warming up. Obviously we would rather not but we had to adjust still to a new team, but then after that it was analyzing what we were doing wrong and in my opinion it was the energy we had especially after dropping a game. Grosloup and I told them to highly communicate, have a lot more energy, and play together, and the rest is history! Energy and consistency are massive for Swiss days like this though, so I always try to highly emphasize it to them after everything.”
That makes sense. For the other two matchups it really felt like the mental resilience was there to see the games through despite the suffered losses in between. As if we coped much better with the pressure than our opponents. Did it feel this way within the team comms as well?
Spookii: “For me I always remind them after everything that there’s either plenty of time left, or “0-0″, or something along those lines. I try to lock them back in to just the one goal and also in between games reminding them who they are and such. I was pretty hard on them about it today, but in the end they were very resilient and executed when needed as well, so full credit to them for taking the advice and being able to run with it and never be out of the series. Sometimes you have to lighten the mood as well so we joked about having my job on the line for a couple good laughs between games as well.”
One more thing; what do you think was the key to going 3-0 as the #1 of both brackets this time around? What changed since last Open? This time I won’t accept just “have fun meta” as an answer. [laughs] Surely it has to be more than just a mental thing right?
Renshiro: “It is more than that; a good performance last open, and other teams making roster changes boosted our seeding significantly, so not having to play Five Fears or Pioneers to do 3-0 helps a lot of course.”
Lari – finkka
ROUNDS