In a thrilling end to one of the best collegiate esports seasons ever, Redbird Esports beat Maryville Esports 4-2 in the Grand Finals of the Overwatch Collegiate Championship (OWCC). That win capped off an incredible season for the Redbird Esports Overwatch team that saw them win sweep the Collegiate Esports Commissioners Cup (CECC) and the NACE Starleague – Spring 2024 Varsity Premier Playoffs.
Even Redbird’s other Overwatch teams had fantastic seasons in their respective leagues, with the Illinois State University Redbird Ajax team taking down the Great Lakes Playoffs in the NECC Challengers Division. CEN got the chance to talk with “Lyte”, the Redbird Esports Overwatch head coach, as well as several of the team’s players: “Scyle” and “cuFFa”.
Winning the Overwatch Collegiate Championship
With the grueling Spring Season finally reaching its end, we wanted to ask the team how they felt coming out on top when it was all said and done.
“I’m feeling really good about it,” remarked Lyte, “I knew from the moment I recruited these players that we had the potential to win everything, and it’s incredibly fulfilling to see my vision come to fruition. We had to deal with a lot of adversity as a team behind the scenes this semester, yet despite all of it we were able to come together and achieve our goals.”
That sentiment was shared by cuFFa who said “Feels good to win it all, the team worked super hard and had to go through our fair share of obstacles to finish on top, can’t really complain.”
By the time Redbird Esports began their intense bracket run through the Overwatch Collegiate Championship, they had already taken down the other two major collegiate Overwatch competitions during the Spring Season. Those wins came through the Collegiate Esports Commissioners Cup (CECC) and the NACE Starleague – Spring 2024 Varsity Premier Playoffs. With the prospect of yet another immense championship win on the horizon, we wanted to know if they felt additional pressure going for the sweep.
For Lyte, it wasn’t a huge concern. “There wasn’t any pressure about us having to sweep the other teams. We saw it as an opportunity to prove to everyone that we were the undisputed best team since we had to beat everyone in order to win through our losers bracket run.”
The coach was composed as expected, but that doesn’t mean the pressure didn’t affect any of the players. When we asked Scyle about the pressure said, “Definitely, going into the event we knew that all eyes were now on us to see if we could win it all, but I think we handled the pressure really well as a team.”
Despite not feeling too much pressure going into the Overwatch Collegiate Championship, it was a rough start for Redbird Esports. In Round 2 of the Upper Bracket, they took a surprising defeat to Maryville Esports 3-1. Being forced into a much longer bracket run if they were going to take home the win, we asked Lyte if the loss affected them.
“Getting knocked down to losers early was definitely a surprise for us as we had shown very good results vs Maryville in scrims and matches throughout the entire semester. With that being said, we were still confident in our play as we knew why we had lost and how to fix it.”
Scyle showed a similar level of confidence in his team, saying “We were just not serious enough going into the first series vs Maryville considering we hadn’t lost to them once the whole semester. The loss was a real wake-up call though, it showed us that the other teams still were very much competitors to us.”
The team that took home the🥇
Now that the COVID-19 pandemic is largely behind us, the past few years have seen both a return to in-person tournaments as well as still plenty of online tournaments, both in Overwatch and esports as a whole. Despite the differences in events, it doesn’t seem like it matters to Redbird Esports whether they’re competing in-person or online.
“I wouldn’t say that there are big differences in how we operate as a team whether it’s in person or at LAN,” said Lyte, “We have systems set in place that are designed to ensure our players develop and build habits that ensure we perform consistently despite the environment we are in.”
Still, after such a thrilling in-person final at the Commissioners Cup, cuFFa couldn’t help but feel like something was missing, saying “The in-person events have an awesome atmosphere to them and I think we thrived in those moments, a lot of people crack under the pressure of a live in-person match but I think it just leveled us up as a team. The energy just makes it so much more enjoyable and makes us play as a team better. Going back to online for the Collegiate Championship was quite a difference, almost feels like a lot lower stakes when you are just in front of your computer in a facility or bedroom as opposed to the stage, even though there was much more money at stake.”
One of the biggest factors in Redbird’s incredible season has been Lyte, the new head coach of the Overwatch team. Before taking the role as coach of Redbird Esports, Lyte was an impressive collegiate Overwatch player in his own right, being part of the Maryville Esports teams that won the 2021 and 2022 Overwatch Collegiate Championship.
Lyte also acts as the coach for the Overwatch team LeftRightGnight, which recently placed 9th in the Overwatch Champions Series 2024 – EMEA Stage 1 while picking up a win over Quick Esports. we asked Lyte how the transition had been for him this season taking on the coaching job for Redbird Esports.
When answering, it was immediately clear that Lyte’s job at Redbird Esports was about more than just winning games when stated, “The transition for me had a steep initial learning curve. I have other administrative responsibilities that I have to attend to outside of the game which sometimes leads to challenges in balancing my role as a coach in-game. Overtime, I learned how to balance both and I am very proud of my players and the team as a whole and how they’ve demonstrated they can perform at the highest level whilst reflecting and adhering to our university’s core values.”
As Lyte noted in a celebratory tweet after Redbird Esports won the OWCC, the team is made up of players hailing from six different countries including Estonia, Australia, and Turkey. We wanted to know if having players come from all over the world created any barriers when they first started playing this season, or if it helped bring them together.
For Lyte, these cultural differences are the norm in Overwatch, saying “Honestly the cultural differences were much less of a problem than one may initially think. The fact that 5/6 players are from EMEA [Europe, Middle East, and Africa] means that they had already been competing with/against each other in the past, so they were all familiar with one another already. Additionally, because esports is primarily done online, EMEA players are much more likely to already be accustomed to playing with players from other cultures/countries as that region is comprised of so many different backgrounds. In comparison, a region such as NA is much different since everyone is typically from the same 1 – 3 countries give or take.”
Scyle put it simply: “Since 5 of us were from Europe we are pretty used to mixed teams, but it took a month or two to integrate cuFFa whose Aussie.”
Despite the team’s dominant season, Redbird Esports doesn’t appear to be slowing down. The young Redbird team consists of five freshmen, and it’ll be up to Lyte and the rest of Redbird Esports to construct the best possible roster going into the upcoming Fall season. While there won’t be much collegiate competition in the summer months, this is the time when everyone goes off on their own, competing in various non-collegiate competitions, and hopes to come back stronger for the new semester. Only time will tell if that leads to stronger competitors looking to give Redbird Esports a run for their money.
