well here I am at Shea Double Lift uh talking with uh Croissant who has been cursed now this is his punishment I guess after things went poorly in the previous year for him he now has to coach a group of five uncoachable players for near airport how did this end up happening so quick story is just uh they were looking for a coach and they were like should we do a rotating set of coaches should we like do A B C XYZ coaches tossing around names and then Bofrost actually uh threw out my name and I I didn't even know why until I talked to him earlier and uh it's because we coached together um for a game changers initiative in in 2022 right before uh the DRX T1 worlds and so that's that's that that's like when we first interacted and I I've only spoken to him once or twice since then um but all of them I guess were like oh that's I had heard good things and they were like that sounds good and so then they just reach Peter reached out to me and it was completely out of the blue i was like rock climbing and I was like oh [ __ ] I'm getting a call from Double Lift so I was like yeah I'm done was it a situation where Bofrost was saying he really liked coaching with you for the game changers thing or he just thought you were a good coach i was just knew or was it just like I just know a guy like I think I know a coach if if we need someone right like um no but I think they uh I think that it was a combination of like oh we've we've heard good things but also uh and they none of them had worked with me um and I had never worked at any of them but as like a baseline they're like it's at least worth a shot and then uh we know he's unemployed so yeah we get a great deal on this This video is brought to you by boot.dev love having them as a sponsor because so many people have reached out to tell me that they've tried boot.dev after our sponsorships and really enjoyed it learned a lot of cool new skills for instance you can learn back-end web development from start to finish in Python and Go listen the smartest way to learn to code is to make sure you're never bored so that you can stick with it long enough to reach your goals and you can't learn to code without actually writing a lot of code and building real projects that's why boot.dev Dev is so cool because it turns learning code into a game for instance you can earn XP levels achievements and complete quests to get a top spot on the global leaderboard and if you ever struggle to understand a concept Boots a powerful bear wizard that's been trained on each lesson can walk you through your issues he's an AI that will ask you questions to help you understand rather than hand you the answers one of the things I love about Boot.dev is that they never want a student to spend money on something that they feel is not helping them that's why they offer a 30-day no questions asked refund policy and a free demo of every course and its interactive features so go to boot.dev and use code Travis Gaffford to save 25% off your first year if you choose the annual plan thank you so much to boot.dev for sponsoring this video okay what do you imagine well obviously you've had some experience so far but like how much of this role is going to be like analyst versus coach cuz I assume I can't imagine any of these five guys are going to be like "Okay I'm going to put together a scouting report on our opponents." So I assume there's going to be a lot of that for you um so yeah I guess how do you see yourself in this role i think it's uh I mean I think because it's flexible and everyone's very chill and they've been great so far it's pretty much what I want it to be but um yeah there's an aspect to it where they might they would definitely not like none of them are going to be making powerpoints hopefully unless because like here's why I should be allowed to play like Teric Jungle right um slide four right uh but I think it's uh some of them do actually ask me pretty granular questions like "Hey like uh have any of has any varys taken TP recently?" and I'll look that kind of stuff up for them um and I I also think that one part of this process that will make it uh like we don't have the ability or structure in our schedule to do like five four to five scrim days a week like some teams might whether within North America or even like in Europe etc like Loson but um my goal is that even if we have a week where we are underprepared in some sense that I can like compensate for that by creating like materials and presentations for the players that kind of accelerates or like makes things more efficient right like shortcuts um and then yeah past that it's like a lot of it will just be people management regular coaching stuff and then for the more analytical stuff that like even the players might not be interested in it's like that's kind of stuff that I hope to do as part of my own brand or on my own stream that like people might be interested and then if people are really responsive to that or that like it's doing well then it's like I can take the best bits that people enjoy and be like "Hey guys so like can we talk about this again?" Right or like um and so yeah that's just kind of like I think some of the early ideas I had for it so if fans are frustrated that the team is not picking something or they're doing something wrong they should go find your stream and convince you that it's important to them i will always listen you know I I always believe that good ideas can come from anywhere even a rat and uh but the uh uh you'll get banned from the other chats right so yeah yeah yes yeah yeah so they could backseat the team through you is what I'm hearing okay uh yeah i was also wondering a little bit about draft because you know I know that everyone's impressions now especially from watching so many of the tier one things international events is you just imagine players and you got a coach behind them and the coaches kind of running the draft so do you have much say in draft for this stuff or like how will that go down so far it's been a lot of uh kind of just priming people to think about what they want to play in advance of cuz otherwise I I think people might have even seen like in some of the early couple of scrims where they hadn't really found their footing yet that maybe it's like 3 seconds left and they're like "Oh [ __ ] what do we pick?" Right so like priming the conversation earlier um in the draft even if you're on like two three knowing what you're going to pick on four or five already uh and then also doing draft meetings like muted or offstream before the matches it's stuff that like I just try to do um but I think you know there's no like perfect percentage of changes per team and there's been some teams where I talk like 80% of the draft and I have like a iron fist you know uh and then there's other there's times like this where it's like yeah if it's for content like Ming is just going to you know he's has a gun to my head and he's like I'm picking Jungle this game and it's like we had an agreement that if we went two zero we would pick juggle but somehow it appeared in the second game and it almost stopped us from going two but uh yeah I think draft is draft is always fun i think Fearless adds an even more fun factor and then there's also the rumor that or it's like just being extended for the rest of the year so I thought it might be weird for fans because we might be on Fearless and then the rest of the world goes back to regular cuz that was kind of what it was looking or panning out to be but now it's like yeah it's like yeah there's a lot of reporting around the idea that this is going to continue so that's cool uh how are you balancing the ability to sort of insert yourself into the team and the discussions versus sort of the egos and expectations of this team cuz I do think in the LCS the you as a coach probably had the ability to be a lot more forceful like you they you were somebody especially because you also had the GM role that's like hey if you're not playing by my rules or you're not doing this I have the ability to bench you that never happened first of all you I'm not saying it never happened I'm saying you could have done it you know like the power dynamic was way different they this team has the ability to bench you so so Uh I guess how are you navigating that cuz that's got to be different you know yeah i think the beautiful thing is that it's all it's all out there right uh so there's no there's never going to be a question of like oh like this happened or that happened or he said she says it's like people can see if I handle a situation well then I think the team will be better for it right and if I do do poorly I think I'll get feedback um and then I'll try to handle that way but my my goal is like I want to like I want to make sure I navigate things smoothly but one thing that I think that hasn't really been talked about is uh there there's so many potential cons to like a thing like this a team like this um and obviously people are excited about the pros but the not the pro players i knew Yes I knew what you meant the pros and the cons yes but I think the I'm worried about people and the community ganging up on certain players and I I want to protect players and stop that from happening because I've always felt that for players even on LCS teams where people like they see even less and they they jump on somebody but the thing is now that you see more there's like little things that people can like said this should happen and like it didn't happen or something yeah and and I think Spa's been the target for a lot of it but like later on it could be Blade or Peter or anyone and um yeah I just want to make sure that doesn't happen because like competing is difficult enough by itself competing and being a public figure and even more enhanced public figure through streaming that's a lot and uh people have really bad days that doesn't mean that they're bad people etc right so I think that's my job and it's uh I'm not too worried about navigating conversations because I think that's I've always been good at mediating but it there is a learning curve to like doing it in front of other people um and it's harder to also like a lot of it is I would pull people one-on-one right team as it not be like you know content yeah yeah come into this Discord call with me alone yeah that's funny uh all right well oh I guess my last question is uh you know I just did the interview with Peter and Eugene and they were both being very clear about how they're like "Listen we don't want to be uh 100 hour a week sweaty pro player lifestyle grind all that stuff." And so they're like you know our goal is to see how well we can do off of right now at least it's two scrim days a week maybe some other stuff obviously they're going to be practicing solo Q and all this stuff for you as a coach you know I I don't mean to pry into the specifics of your agreement with the team but are you looking at this as something that you're going to be doing 40 hours a week or how do you manage this especially in relation to the team yeah that's something that I'm still figuring out but just the simple part of it is I only have two goals for the year and one of them is to make the biggest impact that I can on North American League of Legends and for a long time I felt like that was through like oh I want us to have better international performances to get there I need to like win the LCS right and um or joining Team Liquid like uh you know trying trying to you know level up one team at a time but that's kind of limited and so I think there probably will be some weeks where I'm trying to work like extra hard with the team because we have to ramp up at a certain part of the season or playoffs um and then there will be other times where it's more about like oh maybe I can make uh the team's being more chill maybe I can make my own content about like this player in the LTA or like this kind of um like phenomenon that's going on uh and just try to level up the region as a whole i think this is this opportunity has been really cool even so far because I've even seen people be like I started off as D4 when and through these scrims like I've just applied things that they've talked about and I'm already master like after this short period of time and so um yeah trying to contribute that way and then the second goal that I have is just to be in China for worlds ideally with a team but if it's like a European team because all the North American teams are full or something like that then that's like it is what it is so I think this is also a good like this is a great opportunity in that sense too because um I can just get more like otherwise I have to like DM people and like you know go through channels like that but now it's more like obvious to people like this is what I want to do i want I honestly even I've talked to LPL teams before about working with them and I just want to as big of a T1 fan as I am like Korea can't win four years in a row otherwise Lolli sports in general is like going to suffer for it I think but you're just so your goal is go to worlds and try to help stop the Korean trains i wouldn't use those words specifically but yeah yeah very good where can people find your stuff because I I was enjoying watching your stream it was a different perspective on watching a coach watch the team that he's coaching during it so where can people find your stuff uh you can find me on twitch.tv/croissantl or Twitter and the same and we do we've been doing a little bit of a prediction show too for some of the stuff so you for those of you that haven't seen Croissant on the channel yet you can check out that stuff if you want to see more of him as well so either way thanks so much looking forward to seeing what you're going to do it is currently uh almost 1:30 a.m because we've done a very long uh shoot here for the team and all stuff i'm sure you for having me in your lovely home Travis yeah yeah can I sleep in the guest room yeah you know what you could definitely sleep in the guest room of my home i hope you enjoy the beautiful kitchen and all that stuff you know thank you so much for the interview for everyone else you can check out the rest of my covers of all things NACL and Mir airport right here on my YouTube channel