Today I am proud and pleased to present, once again, Team sMi. Some of you may know us from our history in BroodWar, and some of you from SC2 amateur leagues. Over the course of BroodWar we were known as one of North America's strongest teams with a lineup featuring many top players (NonY, KawaiiRice, NerO, lastgosu, wannabecool, Suppy, LzGaMeR, iNkA, Stalife, Saddles, and the list goes on). When BroodWar was winding down and the launch of SC2 was drawing closer, we became less active and lost a good chunk of our top players. By the time SC2 hit the scene, we only had Wannabecool still on our roster until he left to pursue an opportunity with It's Gosu eSports.
Over the course of the last three years, we have done what we could to build up our reputation within the community of new amateur teams. I believe that we've done a good job of that. We've competed in just about every league an amateur team could possibly compete in and done fairly well without a sponsor. Our players were and are home grown Master-Grand Master level talents. From time to time we would lose some of them due to the fact that they had out grown what we could offer them without any other type of support. Today, this changes!
Allow me to introduce our starting roster:
The players will be equipped with gear from Razer and Alienware as long as they are with us. We however are not "sponsored" by either company. We do have some behind the scenes investments coming in that I cannot discuss as the investor/s would like to remain anonymous. However, myself and the rest of the management team will do whatever we need to do to support our players even if it has to come out of our own pockets.
And now, here are the people behind the scenes:
Our Philosophy
We strive to make each and every player that is under the sMi tag feel like they are part of a family rather than just a team. We want them all to feel that they can go to anyone within the team about anything. Be it life, SC2, school, or something else, we do what we can to support one another with anything. We care about the well-being of each and every player on our roster and our first priority is to them. We make sure that each and every one of them understands that they can come to us with anything on their minds and try to check in with them whenever we have the opportunity to. We want to know if there is anything bothering them or to just see how things are going for them, not just in SC2, but in their life in general. This is the sort of philosophy that sMi was built on. We're laid back, but very serious when we need to be, and always there for one another. Once you're part of sMi, you're always part of our family.
On that note, I'd like to explain why we won't be calling the players listed above our "Pro Team" and why we call them our "Starters" instead. The reasoning behind this is so that there is as little separation between them and the other sMi members as possible. We believe that a great community and team is as close to one another as it can be. Any large separation between them is a bad. We won't have any sMi Academy or sMi Pro Team, we are and always will be just Team sMi. The only distinction between the "Starters" and the others is that the "Starters" are who will represent sMi in major things and start for the team in team leagues. We want everyone under the sMi banner to mingle and get along as much as possible. A great community behind you is the most important kind of support a player and team can have. That is what the non-starters are, great community support. If one of our "Starters" ever show that they are consistently bad manner and don't get along with others on the team, we will let them go regardless of who they are. No one is too important to act like the world revolves around them.
Goals
We hope to be able to re-establish ourselves as one of the top North American based teams, only this time in SC2. To accomplish this, we hope to have great showings at some of the major tournaments around the globe (MLG, NASL, IEM, HSC, etc.) in due time, win and compete at the top level of team leagues, and of course display our prowess on the ladder. As a team, we want our individual players to consistently improve themselves and accomplish, not only their SC2 goals, but their personal goals as well. In good time, hopefully we'll be able to gain a healthy amount of support from the community and be able to live up to your expectations.
Thank all of you for taking the time to read this. You can expect to hear great things from us in the near future. We look forward to your support!
http://www.smiteam.net
@sMiTeamSC2