EPT
Coaches and Starcraft:
Starcraft NEEDS coaches. No I am not talking about analytical coaches, I am talking about out of game coaches. There comes a time in every player's career where they get frustrated at themselves, or at the game. For example, you are not happy with your play recently, you are on a slump and losing all the time. What do you do? You grind more games and practice. Well guess what, YOU ARE WRONG! A lot of players seem to forget how important player health is. Your mind does NOT operate independent from your body. Being healthy and active is just as crucial to success as practice games are, if not, more important. Some players do exercise daily and that is great! But not everyone does that and I feel teams really need to hire coaches to make sure your players are exercising. Another reason I feel out of games coaches are essential is because a lot of players have personal issues and need someone to talk to. Many players dropped out of college or are fresh out of high school to play Starcraft professionally and may be under a lot of stress from not getting results. The feeling could be similar to when playing poker, you see your hand and have pocket aces. You feel confident, you love your hand, you are even passionate about your hand. You grasp your fingers around your chips, using the insides of your arms to surround every last one, and without hesitation, push all your chips to the center of the table and go all in. Every other players immediately folds except for one other player, sitting directly across from you. He had pocket kings. The flop is great for you, 4, 7, 2, all mismatch suits and no clear straight or flush for your opponent. The turn card is a 10, you feel you got him beat. The dealer picks up the final deciding card, catches a glimpse of it before placing it on the table. She slightly smiles, and looks over at the player, the player sitting across from you. Before you can see what the card is your heart already starts to sink. That feeling is what all starcraft players feel when they are not achieving the results they want to achieve or in this case, NEED to achieve. As one could imagine, this is a stressful thing for any one person to go through alone and sometimes people need someone to talk to.
Many players are extremely talented, and are blocked by some sort of mental barrier. IdrA immediately comes to mind. I feel like with more out of game coaching, players like him would still be around today. They need someone to show them that they are NOT all in, and there are other options they may have not considered.
TL;DR: SC2 needs out of games coaches to help players overcome mental barriers, and make sure they are healthy. Grinding out games is not how you become better at starcraft once you reach a certain point of skill and commitment to the game.
