SEMPHIS bulks up Cloud9 entourage in Lisbon
Having been benched on Envy, Kory "SEMPHIS" Friesen may be set to make a return to competition, but this time as a coach. He has joined Cloud9 in Lisbon, with the team looking to transition out of using Soham "valens" Chowdhury.
SEMPHIS tweeted out on December 11th that he was set to get on a 18-hour flight, which is about the length of time it'd take to fly between Vancouver, where SEMPHIS is based, and Lisbon.
If SEMPHIS does end up coming on board to coach Cloud9, he will reunite with former TSM teammate Timothy "autimatic" Ta, who is the team's current longest serving member. After reaching out to autimatic, revealed to HLTV.org that Cloud9 intended to transition away from using valens in the long-term and that SEMPHIS is yet to take over in-game responsibilities for the team:
valens was not supposed to be our coach for this long of a period. Right now, we are looking for a new coach to take over his place.
I have played with SEMPHIS in the past, we are just testing things out, seeing how he meshes with the team and then everything will go from there. We are seeing if our personalities are good together, he is not really giving any input with in-game stuff, we are just seeing if we can work together.
valens is gonna stay with us until we are in a good place, but in the future he will most likely step down.
SEMPHIS has been inactive on Envy since the end of October when he was replaced by Matt "Pollo" Wilson, who himself is on trial. SEMPHIS announced in mid-November that he was open for analysis or commentary positions over the holiday period, but it'd appear that call for work moved into a slightly different direction.
SEMPHIS coming in to coach would be the second change Cloud9 would have made for the tournament, with Dane Ismail "refrezh" Ali coming in to replace Maikil "Golden" Selim due to the Swedish IGL's on-going health problems. It was announced on BLAST's pre-show that Robin "flusha" Rönnquist will be taking up the IGL position for the tournament.
