100T Goldenglue: “[At 100T] the stress feels low and people can feel [free to] take risks, and not be fearful of looking stupid.”

Q: What do you think went wrong today?

Goldenglue: A few things went wrong: we were more timid than normal, usually we’re more aggressive in mid game and we take more fights. In the regular season, we could get away with bad early games and find our ways back in.

Cloud9 played really well, they got their early game leads and they just held it and choked us slowly out of the game. It was a bit of a reality check. You can’t just int your early game away and just find something random.

Q: The drafts looked weird today, picking lanes where C9 can roll you when 100T’s weakness is early game. What was the thought process there?

Goldenglue: In game 1, the TF was kind of a surprise, and if I could go back I’d probably take the Senna instead of the Smolder.

But Smolder was actually stacking pretty insanely fast. The main problem is that we were losing both side lanes, and couldn’t just ride out the Smolder hitting 225 stacks. And Game 2, the bot matchup is definitely snowbally, but Aphelios can get push.

But we messed up the 2v2. We didn’t take the cheater after 3 waves and died to the gank. And then Game 3, the thought process was to give Sniper counter pick and see what happens, basically.

Q: Fudge thought that Sniper didn’t look comfortable on the Rumble, thoughts?

Goldenglue: We’ve practiced it before, but it’s definitely not his most practiced champion. It was like ‘we lost two games hard, what pick gives you confidence that you’re gonna run this guy over?’

Q: I’ve heard that the team is a little under the weather.

Goldenglue: We had to use a sub yesterday for River, we weren’t able to scrim all week with him, he had cold symptoms. He felt a bit better today but his energy was low and he’s the leader of our team vocally.

It definitely hurt our chances today. We looked lost today, missing that aggressiveness and strategy. River’s probably the smartest player on the team and most experienced, don’t think he played awful today but he wasn’t at the same energy levels as normal.

Q: You’re sitting here with more experience than literally every single player combined and they’re doing all this in their first split together. How does that factor into your coaching?

Goldenglue: Sam (@SpookzOCE) and I do it because we have a lot of experience. We definitely validate and normalize their emotions — we were talking to Sniper after the series and he was like this doesn’t feel real, like nothing feels real, like you can’t believe that this just happened. It’s a blowout and it’s a big reality check.

We’re just trying to get them to focus on the takeaways and lessons from the series, it’s not very productive to focus on how we just got blown out. It’s about ‘What can we learn from this match? And let’s move on. We play again in two days.’

Q: It must be really difficult to pull players back from losing this hard, how are you going to approach that?

Goldenglue: We already had a pretty deep cut conversation in the team room before this, getting people to express how they feel and talk about what we need to do.

To fix things — the reality is we only have one day of practice and then we have a match. There’s a lot of things that we learned that we don’t do on game day. It’ll be tough, there’s no clear answer to it besides having tough conversations and band-aid solutions.

Q: Speaking of which, how are you feeling about that match against NRG?

Goldenglue: Especially in their last superweek, NRG were looking kind of broken. We don’t feel great after getting blown out like that, but whether our opponent was NRG or DIG we need to fix our own problems.

Q: Does that mean you’ll scrim tomorrow or is it an off day?

Goldenglue: Yeah, I mean as we were losing game 3, I was messaging teams and looking for scrims. We need to get games in — I don’t want our last games of League of Legends before NRG to be these games.

Q: How did the infectious energy and vibes for 100T come about?

Goldenglue: I think Sam and I are creating the environment where the stress feels low and people can feel free to take risks, and not be fearful of looking stupid. I think it just really meshed with our players.

What kind of sucks is that today we didn’t feel that way, and from listening to comms we were kind of lacking that. We’re trying to manage the stress levels of these guys by joking around with them and making that environment easy, you know?

Q: Do you have any fun/quirky stories about players?

Goldenglue: In between scrims, we play basketball together, Sniper tries to 1v1 Sam. Quid does a bunch of pull-ups, him and Sniper will do that. Meech stays at the office by himself, super late every night to grind.

Meech is like the biggest grinder, I think he’s probably played more games than everyone else in the LCS this split, if I had to guess.

Q: You know how much Yeon plays right?

Goldenglue: Meech plays much more than Yeon. He’s a turbo grinder. The other thing is that we have been playing VALORANT as a team sometimes, occasionally we’ll just 5-man an unrated game. River is definitely our fragger, he’s like ‘this might be my next career.’