T.c: "I think there's a good chance we'll see some changes"

Disappointment. That's the word that most fans won't hesitate to use when talking about this Complexity line-up. In the last two and half months, things have looked dismal for the youthful side that features some of the most promising wonderkids that NA has to offer. This tournament was no different as the team bombed out of the IEM Cologne Play-in, losing every game they played.

After this disastrous end to the season, Dust2.us' Liam "Slevo" Slevin had the opportunity to talk to Complexity's coach Tiaan "T.c" Coertzen who shares the pain felt from their performances. The South-African coach had lots to say about their current form, the community's reaction to Paytyn "junior" Johnson, and future changes to the roster.

How disappointing is it for you guys to finish the season like that on the first day of the Play-in?

The latter half of the season has been pretty horrendous, to be honest. We are not really reaching any of our expectations so it would have been really nice to come to Cologne and at least make it to the next stage, to the groups. So yeah it's very disappointing, honestly for all of us. We have tried putting in a lot of time but honestly, it feels like the more time we are putting in it almost feels like it's getting worse at this point. So yeah, very disappointing, and like obviously things have to change going forward for us.

So you said you put a lot of time in as a coach and with the coaching staff behind you. What kind of changes have you tried recently that just haven't seemed to be working out?

If you look from at the start of the year we have tried a lot of different combinations of players together, when we made the team at first FaNg was playing a lot of positions with junior. After the first two months, we swapped JT to most of those positions with junior, and even now we have got Grim playing some of those positions with junior, so you know we've tried a lot of different pairings, and it's like nothing has been working honestly! It feels like we've been putting a band-aid on the problems that we have. We spend countless hours reviewing, going over mistakes and advantageous situations that we are throwing away and it just keeps happening. It's like it doesn't matter how many times we review it, the next time we have a match in that same situation the same errors are happening. It's just not good enough at the moment. If we can't learn from our previous mistakes we are never going to get better.

What can you tell us about the scrims and what's been going on behind the scenes. Has it been different from what's been showing on the server or has it been a struggle as well?

It depends honestly. We have good days and we have bad days in the scrims. Some days we will show up, everybody's communicating really well and the scrims are going really well then in turn because like you can see from our games a lot of the times I don't feel like the system is a problem. A lot of the time it's mostly when the rounds start breaking down that we are making poor individual decisions, we are not playing together and we are not trading off of each other. So we have good round openings most of the time and we get map control and we are in good situations but then if we don't have good communication then we are unable to close out any of the rounds. And that's a problem that keeps on happening in a lot of our games, it's communication that has been a big issue in this team since the creation of it. So we really need people to step up in that sense, we need more vocal people on the team pretty much and we need people to get more vocal so we can stop making these mistakes.

In relation to junior, he's a player that's come under a lot of scrutiny and it hasn't done much for his confidence or morale. For you as a coach, how are you able to keep that morale high?

I think it's difficult for any player when you are getting talked about like that by the entire community but yeah you kind of just have to take the focus away from them and try to focus on yourself right. Also, we've tried working with him as well, JT has put a lot of time in as well. Watching demos with him on his positions, we've all sat with him and tried to look at where can we improve, and what we need to do differently. From my side, it's just trying to get his attention away, don't even worry about what the community is saying. If there's some frustration within the team as well I try to get him to focus on himself, on his own game, and on what we can do better. I mean it's tough obviously for anyone in that type of situation, but you have to look inward and block out the noise.

As the coach, coming into the off-season now do you still have faith that this could be the five that work or could we possibly see changes coming off of the off-season?

I think there's a good chance we'll see some changes heading into the new season. Like I said, I think we've tried what we can at this point and it just feels like we've just been putting a band-aid on the problem. So for me personally, and I think for most the people on the team, to get the motivation back and to just go into the next season with a little bit of motivation I think there will definitely be some changes going into the next season. That's all I can say on that for now.

With their loss to Astralis, Complexity will be out of action until at least after the player break. The American squad's next appearance is slated to be the BLAST Premier Fall Groups in mid-August.