The Evil Geniuses-Team Liquid Proleague alliance had high hopes for the 2012-2013 season of Proleague, but quickly became a cautionary tale about the dangers of underestimating Korea's premier team tournament as they racked up loss after loss.

Having won multiple Proleague championships with SK Telecom T1, Park Yong Woon came in looking like the only man who could reverse EG-TL's fortunes when he took over as head coach halfway through the season. However, not even one of Proleague's greatest head coaches could right the sinking ship, and EG-TL finished the season in last place.

From his new position on the head coach's chair at CJ Entus, coach Park talked to Team Liquid about his half season with EG-TL.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

How did you come to be the head coach of EG-TL?

After my position in SK Telecom T1 was changed [after four years as the SK Telecom head coach, Mr. Park was replaced by Boxer and moved to an advising position], T1 asked me to take charge of their League of Legends team. As I was taking a look at LoL matches at home, I was keeping StarCraft 2 as well. I noticed that EG-TL looked very lifeless – the team had some good players, but the results just weren't coming.

How should I put it, I felt sympathetic toward this team? So I went forward and said I wanted to take them on. So that's where it all started.

How well did you know StarCraft 2 at the time?

Honestly, I hadn't played that much StarCraft 2. Before I changed positions I had been playing consistently, maintaining masters league in all three races, but after that I had almost stopped playing, just keeping up with VODs. Not as thoroughly as when I was an active head coach, just watching some videos here and there.

I was worried I wouldn't be able to keep up with trends, but luckily for me, the strategic trends at the time hadn't changed so much. So it wasn't that hard to adjust. Playing again, it wasn't that hard to get back into masters.

What was your first impression of EG-TL once you joined the team?

Well, this is kind of negative but... I felt forlorn? (laughs)

Honestly I went in with a lot of confidence, but after a week I wasn't feeling that great.

There were problems with the most fundamental things, the team didn't have a good base. If you don't have a good base, then nothing you do as a coach can really have an effect.

When I say a good base, I mean an environment where players can focus on practice, and that environment just wasn't there in EG-TL. Also, there were some problems with the players' mindsets, their practice habits, and their habits in general. Overall, the players had a good grasp of the game, but some of the players were stubborn since they had been playing the game by themselves. They were sort of loners? Not really paying much attention to what others were doing, and not really that receptive of things they were told. I don't mean everyone was like that, but overall the atmosphere was not very good.

Also, with the attitude the players had toward Proleague, and just their discontent in general – I just felt so helpless, thinking about how I was supposed to get everyone in line. I think I spent half of my time on EG-TL talking to the players about the mindset they should have as pros, talking to them about their life and their careers, I spent a lot of time on that. It took more time than I expected, which made things tough.

The guys were very open-minded when you got to know them, Jaedong, Oz, HerO, Revival, etc., but since they were used to playing by themselves for so long, I don't think they really got to use that to their advantage.

So rather than working on things inside the game, you had to spend a lot of time on out-of-game problems?

Yes, if you don't lay a good foundation, if you don't take care of things outside of the game, then players will just listen to your in-game coaching through one ear and let it exit out the other.

Back on SKT, and CJ right now, I would be excited to go to the practice house every morning. On SKT I was always filled with thoughts that our team could be the best. Right now on CJ, it's a team where things roll along well without having to do any foundation work. In contrast with that, EG-TL was a team with skilled players, they were not in a good place mentally. So thinking of the work needed to be done to bring them to a place where they could reach their potential, it was just tough waking up and thinking about whether I could really get the job done.

But still, I told myself I'd take them as far as I could, and that's how it went.

Do you think some of the problems you had with the players were because they were focused on individual competition and not Proleague?

Yes, EG-TL wasn't a team specialized for Proleague, and the individual players had all picked a foreign team in the first place because they wanted to go to international tournaments. Even if they got less money than from corporate (KeSPA) teams, they were okay with that because they saw advantages and benefits that made up for it on foreign teams.

You could say that when the team joined Proleague, everything just went in such a different path from what the players intended, both in terms of their daily lives, and in terms of their goals. They felt frustrated with the situation.

(laughs) Isn't this interview going to hurt EG-TL?

I think people can understand how the goals of the players and the teams not matching can lead to a bad situation.

Also, when I first joined, the basic living environment in the house wasn't up to standards. I hate to sound like I'm bashing someone, but there was just a lot of time spent getting the house in order.

The players weren't eating well, they weren't eating at regular times. One player would wake up at 10AM to practice, and another player would wake up at 3PM to practice. The house wasn't properly cleaned so it was a mess, and it the players didn't seem to be in good health, always complaining about getting colds. There were a lot of problems piled on top of each other, and it took almost a month to take care of that – installing curtains, cleaning up the beds, re-arranging the practice room, hiring a maid so the players could eat better, etc. – a lot of combined things so the players could focus on practicing.

I had wanted to get off to a fast start, but because the foundation wasn't stable, it felt like we didn't make any real progress for around a month.

Were any of the team house problems due to a lack of funding from EG-TL?

No, not from what I could tell. Talking to Alex (Evil Geniuses' owner), he gave me most of the things that I requested.

There may have been some problems in communication, but Alex did try to take care of the things I asked of him. And from my end, from a COO perspective, I tried to do what I could do to save him money.

What are some of the policies you implemented at first? For instance what kind of schedule did you put in?

From what I had heard, the team did have a kind of schedule in rounds one and two, but in round three they had returned to a free practice schedule since the results weren't coming in no matter what they tried. That was what the players had wanted.

But I didn't think it was possible to get good results that way, so I tried to get the players to live a regularly patterned life. I have some web-based planning tools on the web I used for training since SKT, so I fixed that to fit EG-TL. I tried to make an atmosphere where the players could talk a lot about the game. Also, the amount of practice had been severely lacking before, so I tried to bring that up to standards.

Were the many excursions for international tournaments a large hindrance?

Yes, they had a big effect. Going to Sweden for DreamHack would mean a player wouldn't return to proper condition for two days and wouldn't bet able to practice properly. There were a lot situations where player would have to play in Proleague just a day or two after a tournament, without having time to practice.

But the reason I had to let the players compete in foreign tournaments was because they needed the motivation. If they didn't go to foreign tournaments, then they would fall flat in Proleague as well. So there wasn't any choice – and the players said this to Alex as well – but I had to let the players compete in foreign tournaments.

If they were KeSPA players, I would have told them not to compete internationally. But because of the characteristics of the teams, I thought that you had to send the players to foreign tournaments for them to have the motivation to work hard. Because of that, they went to a lot of international tournaments, and that affected Proleague a lot.

There were a lot of rough patches, but there were some periods where things went well as well, even going on win streaks. How did you feel then?

When I first got into the team, I felt the players just weren't good. I would occasionally tell them "I'm sorry to say this, but we're playing really poorly right now."

Talking to coach Sungjin (trOt, the previous head coach of EG-TL), the players had been confident at first because the KeSPA players hadn't been playing StarCraft 2 for very long, but as more time passed, even the players started to think to themselves that they weren't that good.

Teaching the players the right mindset, I told them that the key to improving was about the most basic things, and there was no other way around it. At a base level you have to practice a lot, and you have to find a way to get better within that large amount of practice. I said that without that base level of practice, they couldn't move on to the next step, and things of that sort. The players followed that well and practiced hard, bringing their skill up to a certain level.

So when we were on a win-streak in the middle of the fifth round or so, it did feel kind of good, and I thought that we were playing very well. However, when the patterns started breaking down, when we went on losing streaks again, that kind of thing always happens for a reason: players had to go back home, had to go meet somebody, and assorted private reasons. At those times, I would think "Sigh, if this was a corporate team there would be a way to control this."

Did you ever think that the EG-TL players just weren't guys who could be put into a KeSPA style training regimen, considering they were mostly guys who left KeSPA teams of their own accord to play SC2 and join foreign teams?

No, I don't think it's something that fundamentally lies with the players, it's about the character of the team. EG-TL was a team where it was difficult to implement KeSPA style training.

For example, Air Force ACE, I used to say this to their head coach a lot: you have players who used to be on corporate teams, but there's no way for ACE to get results with a KeSPA style system. You need a system that fits Air Force ACE.

Similarly with EG-TL, it was a team with characteristics where it was hard to implement a KeSPA style system. It's not a problem of the players. It's decided by the team.

What kind of realistic goals did you have as the season went along?

To myself, I did imagine scenarios where we miraculously got a 70~80% win rate and made it into the playoffs, and then went on to win. But as more time passed, it started to feel like an impossible goal, disappointing as that was. So goals would be adjusted as we went along. In round four, it would be "let's at least go 4-3." In rounds five and six when we were eliminated from the playoffs, we wanted to try our best until the end. As pros, we wanted to at least do that much, do our best until the final game. That was our final goal.

Did the EG-TL players perform worse in official games than they did in practice? Or was what we saw on TV their normal level?

It depends on the players, but overall I think it was about the same. There were even some players who played better in broadcasted games like aLive. I don't think there was a big effect, everyone's skills came out around the same.

A lot of the EG-TL players went on to do very well in tournaments after Proleague ended, reaching the finals of many tournaments. What did you think when you saw that?

I was very proud of them.

There's a thing where if you make something a habit once, it stays with you. Or at least I think so. (laughs) So I was proud. What's important is whether or not they keep it up going forward.

If you could take the things you know now and start the EG-TL job all over again, what would you have done differently?

First, I think it was a stretch to try and take over a team mid-season. (laughs) I probably wouldn't have thought to jump into it in round four. If it had started in round one, if I had the time to prepare the team, then I would have taken the opportunity again. Looking back now, I don't think I would have decided to enter Proleague in round four.

If I could do it over again... honestly it was great working with the players, but just personally it was taxing on me. I would want to have gotten things started off in a different way. (laughs) I had a lot of experience with KeSPA teams but not much with international teams, so there was time spent learning about the team and figuring it out. Learning about foreign tournaments and stuff, a lot of combined factors. If I started over again, I do think I could have done better.

If you could bring an EG-TL player to CJ Entus, who would it be?

Of course, it would be Jaedong. He's the one I would want the most.

What do you think about TaeJa? He's a very talented player, but he really dislikes the team house life.

The way I see it, I don't think it's right for TaeJa to practice at a team house. At first, I even thought "the heck kind of player is this?" but he has his own 'coaching staff,' so to speak. His older brother is there to give him advice, and TaeJa follows him very well. In that state, where he relies on his brother a lot, I don't think there's any synergy to be gained by him entering a team house.

You also got a chance to work with NaNiwa and Snute during your time at EG-TL. What did you think of those players?

They were different from the image I had of foreign players, I had heard that foreigners didn't practice that much. NaNiwa and Snute practiced even more than the Korean players on EG-TL, so I was really surprised.

It was frustrating because we couldn't really communicate well, but I felt that they were putting a lot of effort into practice and studying the game. It would have been really nice if I could have talked to them more fluently, so that I regret.

You think players like that could join KeSPA teams, as long as their skill level was at the sufficient level?

Yes, I think we have to keep ourselves open to that kind of possibility.

If you could have taken the EG-TL players and coached them as a team with solely international tournaments as a goal, what would it have been like?

Ah, I would have started things very differently. I would have set our goal to sweep through all of the tournaments. Though I don't know how the results would have been, I think I would have had confidence, at least.

So foreign teams are an attractive destination?

Yes, they are definitely attractive. Even now, I'm trying to take my experiences from EG-TL and SKT, and do something new again at CJ Entus. There are even things that we should learn from foreign teams. Not in terms of practice, but in terms of marketing the team.

How would you rate your half season with EG-TL?

Frankly, I was kind of embarrassed after it all ended. My pride had been hurt a lot. Still, I do think we really worked hard.

In short... I really regret what could have been. There were many things that could have been improved, we could have done better. We could even have finished in 6th place at the end, I regret those kind of things.

What did you learn from your experience on a foreign team?

My experiences with EG-TL were very valuable, and it helped me a lot in drawing a blueprint for myself going forward.

I had a happy time with EG-TL, and I think it was a great decision to take the job. I was able to go to three foreign tournaments during that time, and it was great to see things in person that I had only imagined before. It was good to meet foreign players, and learn about the lives and thoughts of non-KeSPA Korean players from up close. In a lot of ways, it was a really precious time for me to learn a lot of things.



Stay tuned for a follow-up interview with Coach Park about his new position at CJ Entus!

Interview: Waxangel.
Images: Silverfire, SpoTV, 7mk.