Brief Aside: A quick look at the roster shows 8 of our current roster members have been here since the beginning. How awesome is that? RIP Vaginal Hubris, wherever your journeys have taken you.

Back to the point. With 1 year of this, we are still currently existing under premise 1, having made little to no headway with premise 2. I point to our 3 game losing streak to close out the season.

This is in large part my fault. One side of that is, I've done a poor job scheduling and holding people accountable to scrims. Talking to the teams that consistently beat us, regular scrims and strategy discussion is a part of this. There is no secret, they're just putting in a couple hours (seriously, no more than 1 or 2 scrims and a few extra minutes pre/post scrims and matches talking) more work per week than we are.

The other side of that is, despite the fact that I put in anywhere from 2-5 hours watching youtubes and reading up on map strategy every week, I simply don't have the mind to comprehend the best strategy, then relay that to the team. Especially since i'm trying to turn all that information that i barely understand myself, if at all, into a 5 minute lesson before the match. Part of this is many of us don't play during the week together, let alone scrim. The other part is, i'm just not as good at dissecting that kind of information. I still haven't forgiven myself for our loss on cp_steel. I didn't push us to defend E with all our resources early enough on defense even though Skull had asked us to, then I pushed us all E too soon on offense. If I don't make those simple mistakes, i really believe we win that match (update 4/11: which leads to a 5-3 record and a top 3 seed in the consolation playoffs which means a MUCH easier opponent, or even a bottom 3 seed in the REAL playoffs)

So we're stuck on premise 1, and that's in large part because I personally am stuck on premise 1. One thing i've learned is that if i suck at something, i find people who can help.

That's why I'm excited to announce that Rada will become Co-Leader of the team, effective immediately (if you skipped ahead to this bold line, go back and read. Jerk)

We'll have more to come on this in the coming weeks, but the short and the sweet of it is we'll share administrative responsibilities (the crap that has to get done on the UGC website every week by team captains), and he will take the lead with the performance/competitive side of things.

This is not us saying we plan on being platinum tomorrow. Rather this is us saying it's time to honestly evaluate what works, and what doesn't.

Like I said, we'll clarify specifically what that means going forward. For now what it means is he and I will be holding Post-season (well... at this point they're kinda pre-season) interviews with everyone and he and I both are very excited for your honest evaluations of the team.

With regard to summer season, he and I agree to view it as experimental for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is summer schedules are hectic (mine is, his is, I know Skull's is, but I'll let him talk about that). If you're an NBA fan, think of the NBA summer league. It's about getting reps and trying new things. Our eyes are on the Fall season. I think he and i both would much rather go 0-8 in the summer but get some real answers about improving than go 4-4 again but be clueless and frustrated at the end of the season.

Let me just close on a personal note by saying I feel excited and rejuvenated by this. Hopefully you do too! If you haven't noticed, Rada is good people

So in the meantime, have your eyes open for future announcements (scrims, strats, etc) as well as "interviews" (that's REALLY not the right word... but i can't find a better one).