snav on coaching Shimmer: "It made me realize how much a coach can help a team"

Wyatt "snav" Phillippi is most well known for being a player for the ECL side timbermen, but his presence at the ongoing ESL Impact League Season 3 Finals in Dallas is as a result of his work as a coach. The ECL player, who has worked closely with Shimmer leading up to team's qualification to Dallas, spoke with Dust2.us' Jeffrey "Mnmzzz" Moore following Shimmer's opening loss to Nigma Galaxy. The two spoke about how snav ended up in the coach position for the team and what value he brings, what went wrong in the match versus Nigma Galaxy, and the current state of timbermen.

Please note that the full interview can be found below on YouTube, while the transcript has some key snippets from their conversation.

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How did you find yourself in the position as the coach of Shimmer?

Well I'm currently dating lisa, so I mainly just started out when they first formed as a team helping my girlfriend out, sitting in their scrims and helping them because I have more experience. They ended up doing really well as a team, so I just ended up as their actual coach for the LAN when they qualified.

How valuable is your ECL and Advanced experience for this team?

I think it's truly valuable. I think it's more valuable in online matches because I can actually talk in the middle of rounds and help them out a lot. I think that's part of why they struggled against Nigma, because I'm not giving input in the middle of rounds so they have to come up with decisions by themselves. I think my experience still helps them out on LAN because I did a lot of work watching demos against Nigma, and I had a really good idea of how they were going to play, but I think it just came down to being their first LAN, having nerves, and not hitting their shots.

timbermen have been a mainstay in ECL, and are usually a strong candidate for playoffs, but this season you're in relegation. What happened with that?

What happened with that is we started out the season picking up jitter, I think there was a Dust2 article on that, and I don't really know what happened with that. After two ECL matches with him, he kinda lost his drive I guess, didn't want to play anymore. That left us in a bad spot, we had to play with KEL, and he just came off of playing VALORANT for years and years, so he wasn't really up to speed with all the stuff in CS anymore so it was kinda hard playing with him. It's not really his fault, it's just kinda an unfortunate situation.

You were with Iron Blood briefly, but since then, how has the hunt for an org been going for you guys?

We've had a few orgs that are interested, lower-level orgs though so obviously we're not going to go through with that, but we haven't been actively looking that much since we've had a lot of roster struggles. We don't really think an org is going to want a team with a bunch of roster struggles, so we're trying to figure out our five and then get ready for next season and maybe look for an org.

Watch the full interview below:

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