osorandom: "[FURIA] helped expose a lot of things that we've had issues with"
As eUnited got ready to head into their opening matchup for the Americas Minor, Michael "DuckMoriarty" Moriarty caught up with the team's coach Jared "osorandom" Hartman to discuss the team's expectations for the event, how they've fared in recent qualifiers, and his foray into full-time coaching.
What're your expectations for you and your team coming into this event?
Our expectations are that we make it out of groups, placing top four would be huge, making the Major would be even better.
One of the things we know is that we are a young team, and we do have a lack of experience in certain situations so that can come back to bite us as there are a lot of teams that do have a lot more experience here. Making sure that we play our game and we focus ourselves and we have fun, that's gonna be our biggest thing.
You're lining up into a group with NTC, NRG, and Swole Patrol. Considering those are a couple of teams you've played before actively in North America and NTC as well, do you feel you're prepared enough to face them or is there always a sense of not knowing what's going to happen till the day?
I think that we're pretty well prepared, we've played Swole Patrol a handful of times, like MDL LAN when we were here in London last. NTC is kind of a wildcard for us because we've never played them before, and we've played NRG a few times. NRG is currently on a heater right now as they just qualified for ESL One New York, so they're definitely the toughest competition in our group and so they're our main focus.
You've recently been at ZOTAC, falling in the semifinals to FURIA. Was that a surprising result, to lose to them, or was it a good event in total?
It was a good event in total, they helped expose a lot of things that we've had issues with, so we had a really good team talk about how we can improve and fix issues that we've had and make sure that everyone is on the same page.
It was definitely I think a surprise to a lot of us, especially after the first map that we ended up steamrolling through, so it was a little bit rough to end up losing out the series after having that strong of a start.
Since your last event in Austin you've taken part in a number of qualifiers, this one being the only successful one you've had to see yourselves into an event. Are you and the team focusing on the qualifiers more, or are you looking to get through the Minor first and then eventually look to reach more offline events in total?
It's one and the same, we don't always play to our potential, sometimes we play down to the strength of our opponent especially if we don't play them often, and I think that ends up getting us caught especially if it's a best-of-three and we end up winning the first game so easily. We end up not playing as we should be. I definitely think that we have some issues we need to fix, and punching through the qualifiers is one of our next steps.
In September, your team is going to take part in the ESL Pro League for the first time. What're your main expectations in that first online season?
Our main expectations in Pro League is to make it through to playoffs, we want to be top six. We've already proven that we can compete by playing to our potential.
We missed ECS because we had to play two of our games here from London, so I think we would've been the first team that made it through to playoffs in our first season of ECS. It would've been close and it would've been nice for us to be able make it to the ECS Finals, especially since it was our first pro season for four out of our five players.
Speaking of your first pro season, you've recently gone full-time into coaching. How has that transition been for you having more time to focus on you and your team?
It's definitely been an interesting shift going from a day-to-day job, an 8-to-5, to coaching and I'm finding that I'm doing a lot more managerial tasks to make sure that everything is prepped and we make sure that we have all the details of everything we need.
It changes how I do certain things in regards to coaching, I have more time to watch and prep for teams, I have more time to watch live matches and figure out what I want to take from other matches in order to help us improve as a whole.
Out of the teams here, who do you see as potentially being the one team who will be the most difficult to face?
I think NRG is the one team that's the most difficult to face, they came off of a LAN final at StarSeries, they performed well at ECS, and they're one of the strongest teams here and they seem to be clicking perfectly.
And in terms of a potential dark horse team?
A dark horse team... I'm going to go with FURIA, after their performance at ZOTAC LAN they did really well, and I think that they're gonna have the potential to upset, especially in a Bo1 system.
After all this is said and done and you have a good run through it all and potentially reached the Major, what would your expectations be if you get there?
Once we get there, ideally we make it to the second stage, the Challengers stage. That would be our expectation, so we can make sure we can keep our spot and keep working towards the goal of being a Legends status team.
eUnited have advanced to the Americas Minor playoffs with a 2-0 victory over NTC. They now await the two teams who will advance from Group B following the second day of play, with the playoffs set to kick off on Monday.
