Sport management & Sport psychology for esport: Winning championships
- Powerful sport psychology and sport management techniques from traditional sport and from research work very well in esport.
- Few professionals and even fewer teams are using even basic tactics, and others are struggling with porting over approaches from traditional sport.
- Morning standups, trackable goals, position coaches, and mesocycles are presented below.
- These were brought from traditional sport, based on solid empirical research, refined with experience in esport, and used to win four championships!
Esport leagues are franchising! There is an expectation that financial stability will allow owners to invest in their infrastructure, and performance. However, performance increase does not happen on its own and will not happen without a change in approach towards performance management and intentional investment in coach and athletic director development. There are a number of immediate tactics that current coaches and managers can use, and I present four of them in this article.
Esport teams struggle to maintain high performance. It is common in sport and esport for teams to have moments of high performance and brilliance. Continual high performance is accomplished only through hard work on team & organization culture. That work should include a number of solid sport management and coaching practices .
There are a number of reasons esport teams fail to maintain performance cultures or best-practices in sport management. Typically esport squads follow a band-aid approach when intervening with athletes. Only when things start to go bad do organizations, managers, and coaches take action to try to improve performance. Proactive performance management requires expert knowledge and strong experience on the part of the coach or athletic director. There are two reasons such proactivity, expertise, and knowledge is not found in esport.
Endemic coaches lack experience and knowledge
There are almost no endemic esport coaches or managers with a background in sport science or traditional sport coaching.
I have worked with a number of ex-esport-athlete coaches, and coaches without an athletic background. Many of them struggled to build sustainable environments for high performance.
Traditional sport coaches struggle to adapt to esport
A typical sport manager in traditional sport has a predictable career trajectory, typically spanning several decades.
Some teams have experimented with bringing coaches over from traditional sport. Although, salary ranges have not been high enough to attract strong talent, and predictably results varied a lot.
TSM’s experiment with a baseball coach, and Fnatic’s experiment with a volleyball coach, both failed when those coaches struggled to transition their traditional sport experience to esport.
Practical education is key
Whether you are a teams manager, performance coach, or athlete coach, this article is meant to give you tools to rapidly improve your own performance.
I have had the opportunity to do development work with a number of esport coaches and managers. All of them, traditional or endemic, were motivated to find tools and tactics to improve their athletes’ experiences. This article is a collection of the basic tactics I first encourage. These methods have repeatedly brought me the largest impact with the least athlete resistance, and were the most adaptable across all the esports and teams I have coached.
The Morning Meeting
In the summer of 2016 I had the wonderful opportunity to coach the Team Solomid roster through Riot Games’ NA LCS season. I had a strong game philosophy that I wanted to impart to the athletes, and that required constant correction and discussion during training.
However, esport teams train without drills. It is an uncontrollable environment. Many esport games lack training modes, so each training match is actually an exhibition match with an opponent.
If I wanted to coach them during an exhibition match, I needed the athlete to hear my voice inside their own head. I am speaking, of course, of self-talk, not ESP.
The coach voice
Coaches must craft a strong narrative around their personal game philosophy. In traditional sport a coach can insert their coach voice into many moments of the training. Between drills, within drills, and even during inner-team scrimmages.
However, in esport there are political considerations to stopping an exhibition training. The coach can not pause a match to talk, as they could in traditional sport scrimmages. Therefore, it is crucial to embed the coach voice inside the athlete’s head, in the athlete’s own self-talk. They need to hear a coach’s voice despite long, intense training bouts with many uncontrollable game developments.
I use the morning meeting to reinforce my coaching philosophy so athletes internalize my coaching voice. Here is a sample schedule
- 9:00 — Team gathers and does gratefulness training
- 9:15 — Review of teammates’ biofeedback sleep reports
- 9:20 —Review previous goals & progress
- 9:30 — Diagnose the most relevant problems for today
- 9:40 — Review team & individual goals for today’s training
- 9:50 — Teaching or video footage review
By showing the previous day’s progress, by identifying and creating stories and language to describe today’s problems, and by targeting each player’s own heroic mission for behavior change, I was able to heavily influence the player’s self-talk.
To monitor your progress, and to see proof of your hard work, make sure to listen to your athletes. Your athletes will reveal the narratives and story-lines they are living internally, and time-and-time again I was able to hear snippets of those morning meetings in the post-game interviews and conversations with teammates.
Trackable Goals
There are number of problems with esport training via exhibition matches:
- Wins and losses are abysmal ways to track progress
- Scrimmage mentality is too aggressive and too low-consequence to practice competitive strategies
- Training with opponents is inefficient and difficult if you play against different opponents
- Training for international tournaments using regional opponents gives false positives
Competitive matches give a wonderful opportunity to test progress. I forced the team to consider weekly competitive matches as a test of our training assumptions. During the week, instead of focusing on win-loss metrics, we built goals based on assumptions about the game.
We set goals for the team overall, as well as each individual player. For some weeks, and for some goals, I was able to show visual progress using subjective measures — counting in-game events, stats, or communication.
It helps to make the goals measurable, but since not all events and philosophies in the esport are currently measurable, goal design tests a coach’s skill.
Crafting excellent drills & training goals is a representation of an esport coaches creative brilliance.
Your creativity and insight as a coach or manager determines your skill in guiding your team with correct goals and foci. If you have a deep understanding of the game, and you know how to change your athletes’ behavior, you will design well, your tests will go well, and you will win games. If you do not understand the game, or fail on behavior change, your tests will fail, and you will lose games.
Goal setting for League of Legends in a team environment was complex since the game has multiple stages, and we needed a training goal for each stage of the game as well as for winning and losing scenarios. Oftentimes we would have to shout out new training goals in the middle of an intense exhibition match to make the team adapt to a new game-state.
Make no mistake. Training is the crux of athletic success. Continual refinement and adaptation to make training more effective is the key to catching up to opponents of higher skill. It was while wrestling to optimize training that I conceived of the position coaches and sought the out for my team.
Position coaches address problems that segue directly from training with trackable goals in the complex environ of esport and exhibition matches.
Position coaches
Discipline to training goals is very difficult in esport, where drills are impossible. Players have multiple personal objectives every training game, since each exhibition match can have wildly differing, unplanned game-states. For players, keeping training goals front-of-mind and tracking them in an objective way is difficult. It is not necessary for a player to keep skill training front-of-mind themselves; simply practicing a skill makes it more automatic. Enter position coaches!
Position coaches join a private comms channel with the player and can talk to them during training games, reminding them of key points and training opportunities. After the game they meet with the player and present an overview of the game with regards to the athlete’s personal training goals.
The player also can ask for specific video clip compilations and advice — up to the level of competence of the coach. Personally, I have found that position coaches compiling compilations of video clips is a massive increase in training efficiency for esport athletes.
Developing position coaches
I recruited high-ranked ladder players, who had experience coaching or mentoring in 1-on-1 or team settings.
My initial on-boarding process for position coaches included the following basics
- Craft a coaching philosophy
- Communicating with pro-athletes
- Position coach-athlete-relationship
- Personal development plan
On a weekly basis a position coach is responsible for
- Personal development plan actions
- Attending training & helping their player execute personal training goals
- Tracking and presenting metrics for their player
- Coach meetings
- Compiling tape for their athlete
- optional Preparing teaching presentations for a morning meeting
Effectiveness is based on player buy-in
Players will use their position coaches up to the level of their buy-in to the concept. Obviously at the lowest level position coaches accomplish their weekly responsibilities.
However, ambitious players generally have more initiative. High-level esport athletes are more capable at taking feedback from lower-level coaches. Additionally, they are able design specific training they want assistance with, and frequently request more compiled tape to review and study.
Mesocycles
Microcycles and mesocycles are sport training plans based on recovery science. How long it takes for your muscles and tendons to recover determines the length of a microcycle length. Mesocycles, on the other hand, are largely based on an athlete’s competitive schedule, motivation, teammates, and mindset.
In esport I use the word mesocycle to refer to how many days or weeks I can do extra training matches, and how many days or weeks I have to do less training matches. I based decisions around when to start or stop extra training primarily on teammate motivation and mental readiness.
The mind is inherently lazy, and especially with unchanging environments. If you train day-in-day-out in the same way, with the same number of games, it is hard to make the brain believe that any singular game is very important.
However, it is essential to have maximum focus when training, in order to have maximum learning. When one falls behind in a training match it is easier for an athlete to give up than to dig deep and find a new training objective. When an athlete’s brain knows that 25 minutes after this game they will be in another exhibition match with a fresh start, it becomes especially difficult to get mentally resilient.
In esport there are a few things you can reliably change to stimulate the mind.
- Number of training matches
- Location of training (e.g. bootcamps, training facilities)
- Opponents (e.g. a high ranked team)
- Audience (e.g. a guest athlete or org CEO)
- The bench (C9 2018 summer split)
It is important as a manger and coach to become proficient at rebooting a team by stimulating the players. It is hard to fake stage pressure, and therefore it is hard to have a team be consistently resilient, motivated, and try-hard in training. Emotions that would be irrelevant and ignored by a player who is on stage instead interfere with communication, relationships, focus and motivation.
Neurological learning
Training the same amount of time each day is not optimal for learning. Some weeks a person has deep emotional resources and very high levels of motivation. Other weeks motivation flags and the smallest emotional disturbance can lead to loss of focus or disruption in learning.
If an entire team is high in motivation, and can stand more training, then the entire team can overtrain and get extra benefits.
Alternatively if a player or two is low on motivation, then their internal motivation has to be supplemented with external motivation, active recovery, reduced volume, and if possible by using the bench and putting in a substitute.
I use training volume as the main variable for handling player motivation.
When player motivation was bad we reduced games, but increased the intensity. Less games means that each game is worth more to the athlete’s mind, and I also tried to change the environment.
Training at the RedBull training facility provided a more stimulating environment. Additionally, having Reginald, the CEO of TSM, come and observe training provided even more pressure and mental stimulus.
Using the environment to cause pressure means the player does not need to push so hard themselves to focus. They are able to have intense training for fewer matches, and yet still rest and actively recover.
Maintaining high performance in a team or organization is a difficult journey. It starts with your own identity as a sports manager or coach. I recommend writing your own coaching philosophy, and incorporating these tactics into your arsenal. If you are a teams or performance manager, establish these tactics as processes within your organization.
In future articles I will cover additional high-performance activities and strategies that are applicable across esport. Be sure to follow this Medium account with notifications so you hear about them!
Weldon is a traditional sports coach in swimming & soccer, a qualified sport psychology trainer, and a championship esport coach. He has a Master’s of Sport Science in sport and exercise from University of Jyvaskyla, and has won four titles in League of Legends as an esport psychology trainer, assistant coach, and head coach — 2015 NALCS, 2016 NALCS, 2017 2x EULCS.
You can contact him via his business email weldon@mindgames.gg or ask him a direct question on his daily Q&A talk show AskWeldon at 6:30pm LA time at twitch.tv/mindgamesweldon
