jchancE: "Work commitments are important, but I always work to make my dream come true"

Dust2.us' own Jeffrey "Mnmzzz" Moore caught up with Caleb "jchancE" Davis of Take Flyte after missing his opening match at Fragicago 2024 due to work commitments. The two spoke about the balancing of priorities with life and CS, his lengthy career, and the uncommon stability of the Take Flyte roster, among other topics.

I'm here with jchancE of Take Flyte who has finally arrived after unfortunately missing the opening match versus Ethos V2. So to start, where were you during that opening match?

Unfortunately I was at work, I had to leave a little bit late but I did make it for the rest of the event.

That's sort of been a a trend in your recent history, unfortunately because I do remember at the start of the RMR Closed Qualifier you missed that opening series as well, did you miss that due to your work commitments as well? Was that really frustrating for you to come so close to making your match and only being a couple minutes late?

Yeah, it's a little bit annoying I mean I wish more events started after 5-6 PM during the week, or more events on the weekends too. There are a lot of players, especially in North America, that do work full-time and I have a family that I support. I have a son and and a wife so you know work commitments are important, but I always work to try to make my dream come true because I love Counter Strike.

You mentioned having a wife and a son and I think that shows that you're more of a veteran breed of player than some of these plucky 18-year-old and 19-year-olds who have just come into the scene in CS2. In fact, you've been around for quite a number of years in the space starting your playing career in 2015 for those who don't know. To educate our younger viewers, what was it like playing in the MDL scene back in 2017?

It was definitely a little bit of a different environment. I think a lot of players have learned certain aspects of the game. It's more competitive nowadays and people have had a lot of time to learn the game. So it's different in that aspect, it was definitely a good time. There were a lot of veteran players that played back then that don't play now, so it's just a different environment I would say overall.

At the end of your time in MDL you took a number of years off from the game and then came back a few years later to sort of start over again in ESEA Advanced. What prompted you to come back into the game and start playing semi-professionally again?

I've always loved Counter Strike and I just needed to take a couple years for personal growth and kind of really start off a career and I never left my dream of Counter Strike behind because I just really like playing the game and there's a lot of friends that I've met along the way and that's really what brought me back.

The team that brought you on the road back was originally named Spectre then you played for a while as One More and now you're Take Flyte so that roster has existed essentially unchanged since August of 2023. That's a rarity in ESEA Advanced and ECL to have a team that's been together for such a long time. What do you see as advantages of your team having been together so long and not having decided to make roster changes over the course of the last couple of seasons?

It definitely helps us grow in certain aspects and you know there there's upsides and downsides. We lack the honeymoon period but at the same time we know each other very well and it helps us understand certain situations that newer teams can't. It's kind of a thing that on almost every team I've played on.

I've always believed that it's good to stick with a a core set of players and that's how I've always had success in Counter Strike, making it to MDL or ECL multiple times, is sticking with a solid core of players and not changing things up just because things go wrong every once in a while and and trying to get past that.

With that Spectre lineup you returned to ECL in Season 47 which means there was about an 18-season gap between your first season your last season of MDL and your first season of ECL/ How did you feel about finally being able to return to the top tier of the semi professional scene after such a long time?

Yeah, it definitely felt really really good. I mean we won Advanced which just was a great feeling overall. We've had some disappointing results in ECL but I do believe that this roster has the potential to at least be a middle-of-the-pack ECL team and maybe even past that if we can get to that point. But we just have some hurdles that we're trying to fight and I definitely think that we can do it.

Now last season the One More squad found themselves surviving relegation and returning to ECL. The traditional thinking would be okay we survived relegation now we need to make roster changes now that we've survived to live another day. Was that ever a discussion on the team that we need to make roster changes and why did the squad ultimately decide not to make roster changes?

You know it's always a thought when things aren't going the greatest that they can to make roster changes. I think it's the first thought, especially in the Counter Strike scene in general but there's so many things that go along with roster changes that take time and we had a really solid foundation built that we thought we could take into the next season and have a better season than we did the previous.

Which so far obviously the results haven't been what we what we expected, but there's still more matches in the season and we definitely hope for the best. But to answer your question there's definitely always thoughts about roster changes when things aren't going the way you expect

Turning our attention back to the RMR Closed Qualifier Take Flyte surprised a lot of people by taking that initial win over LAG with Champ standing in and then playing a really close game versus Legacy once you were finally able to come back. The level shown at the RMR CQ was the best we've ever seen Take Flyte play in a long while. What do you think went right for the team in the RMR CQ and what's it going to take to bring that same level into ECL?

It's just a level of confidence and what I would call firing on all cylinders. I feel like one of our biggest problems is just having one player, and it could be any one of us, say "I'm having an off game, I can't shoot back, I'm uncomfortable" and I think what's going to get us past that is recognizing that earlier in games and making sure we're playing roles correctly so that the people who are playing well can end up winning the game for us.

What's the expectation for this event and what would you be satisfied with in terms of a result here today?

This weekend there aren't really any big expectations. Obviously we would love to come out with a win or at least make it to finals, but we're here to have fun and just be friends and be a team and do the best that we can.