chelleos: "It's hard to find the right fifth"

Before ESL Challenger Atlanta 2024 kicks off, Michael "chelleos" Hawkins of the Australian qualifier winner Rooster spoke to Dust2.us' Jeffrey "Mnmzzz" Moore about the state of Australian CS, the search for an organization, and the struggles the team has faced when trying to keep a complete roster together.

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

Australians have long lamented the state of the scene. Have there been signs of improvement?

Overall the competition is pretty much the same. It’s kind of stagnant, not the best up-and-comers. At least there’s a few new faces and new teams, like The Art of War. Our team just tries to keep building experience by going to events.

What kind of direction do you want to take the Rooster brand going forward? Are you looking for any interested organizations?

We’ve put a lot of effort and work into building Rooster up. It’s not like a proper organization, but we take it seriously. We’re open to (an organization), definitely. We don’t want to just represent an org for nothing, we’d rather represent ourselves. Maybe some orgs don’t consider us because they think Rooster already is an organization. But we want an organization at the end of the day.

You guys changed out Sharvesh "dangeR" Saravanan to bring in Joshua “jhd” Hough-Devine for this tournament. Is he a permanent replacement? What’s the challenge been in building a stable roster?

I’m not sure about jhd being permanent, but we’ll see how it goes. Probably dangeR is out of the team; it didn’t really go well at the last event, it wasn’t meshing that well. Every time we go to an international event like a Pro League or something, someone’s quit the team or something like that. There’s a limited number of players, so it’s hard to find the right fifth.

Rooster enters ESL Challenger Atlanta 2024 as the lowest seed, and will face off against EU qualifier winner SAW in the first round of Group A play, on Friday 11:55AM.