T.c replaces Kane as Passion UA coach in surprise appointment

Update: Passion UA further announced that ⁠s-chilla left the active lineup once again as they're likely to miss the BLAST.tv Austin Major anyway. The rest of the article continues as originally written.

Tiaan "⁠T.c⁠" Coertzen has been appointed as Passion UA's new head coach this Friday, April 4th in place of Mikhaylo "⁠Kane⁠" Blagin, who departed the Ukrainian team yesterday.

The move comes less than a month after T.c was released from Complexity following a string of bad results in tier-one tournaments.

T.c did state that he was open to work in any region, however, it's fair to say that nobody predicted that he'd land on Passion UA. The South African coach never worked with teams outside of South Africa and North America, so it'll be curious to see how both parties will deal with the cultural differences and the obvious language barrier.

This significant change comes at a time when Passion UA is dealing with the departures of arguably their two best players — Rodion "⁠fear⁠" Smyk and Dmytro "⁠jambo⁠" Semera — to fnatic in 2025. They notably helped the organization to qualify for Perfect World Shanghai Major last year, their first Valve-sponsored event ever.

Passion UA's CEO Artemijs Rjabovs said recently that the rebuild hasn't been easy and thanked Vsevolod "⁠s-chilla⁠" Shchurov for coming back to the active lineup and prevent Passion UA from losing too many points in the Valve Regional Standings (VRS).

Passion UA's roster is as follows:

Nikita "⁠jackasmo⁠" Skyba
Eduard "⁠zeRRoFIX⁠" Petrovskyi
Oleksii "⁠Topa⁠" Topchiienko
Vladyslav "⁠Kvem⁠" Korol
Vsevolod "⁠s-chilla⁠" Shchurov
Tiaan "⁠T.c⁠" Coertzen (Coach)