Going from Player to Coach in Esports
Tags: Leadership, Gaming, Leadership Development, Esports Market, Coaching

One of the most common transitions that a “more experienced” player makes towards the end of their playing career is to the coaching role.

The coaching role looks and functions slightly differently based on the game (CS:GO vs. League of Legends, for example), but in each case, the coach is in a position of leadership, taking charge over a team of (like pre-existing) players.

This transition adds a lot of challenges to the already difficult challenge of leadership — going from colleague and peer, to “the boss”.

Now in some instances, a player considers this transition to extend their career, despite not really wanting to be a coach. In the corporate world, I’d describe this as a person who wants the title of a leader, but not the job of one.

For the interest of this post, I don’t want to go down that path too far, so I’ll be making the assumption that the player-becoming-coach actually wants to lead, to coach, and to continue their journey out of benevolence, not selfishness.

So what are the added challenges to consider if you’re going through this transition? It’s a long list, but here are a few of the bigger ones.

Organizations rarely, if ever, provide you with the tools, the training, and the support to develop into an exceptional leader (I don’t know of any in the esports ecosystem that do. Kind of sad?)

You want to “remain friends” with the players, your former peers — so you struggle on the uncomfortable tasks like holding players accountable, providing negative feedback or critiques, etc.

You cannot lead from title alone , you must lead through relationship and trust — but you’re not sure how to develop or extend this

, you must lead through relationship and — but you’re not sure how to develop or extend this Giving feedback to players who can point out they’re better at the game than you — you’ll be doubted, early and often, which becomes an obstacle to establishing trust

To the point of accountability, most orgs don’t empower their team’s coaches to hold players accountable. For any roster of 5 players, you have nowhere to turn if a player is benched or sits out, no one competing for playing time to help push the team forward (this is one of the reasons why I’m a fan of having a few reserve or academy players handy — amongst many other benefits I see there. I might detail this in a future post).

Odds are you have no true leadership experience (said another way, you’re under-skilled for the role). This combined with the lack of org support/training is a recipe for disaster.

You’ll now represent “the org” in addition to “the team” — added responsibilities that can be divisive (who comes first when they conflict?)

It’s hard to take off the Coach Hat for what would normally be casual, confidential “offline” conversations

Out the gate, at best, the MOST AVERAGE OF COACHES — knowledgeable about the game, and “work hard”. Do you want to be better than AVERAGE?

Of course this isn’t an exhaustive list, but these are what came to mind.

This is a transition that, as things are today, is set up to fail, but it certainly doesn’t have to be that way. I’m hopeful orgs will start to invest in leadership development for their leaders — but seeing as how infrequent this is today outside of esports, I can’t imagine it’ll become pervasive overnight.

Anyways, being aware of some of these challenges and preparing to overcome them ahead of time will give you a leg-up on the competition.