Young Ninjas, who finished second in the WePlay Academy League group stage, are set to kick off their finals run when they face fnatic Rising on Friday at 18:00 .

We sat down with Fredrik “⁠slap⁠” Junbrant during the media day before the beginning of the WePlay Academy League to hear the Young Ninjas coach’s thoughts on the advent of academy teams and leagues, as well as his vision for the best possible way to make them successful in bringing up youngsters and equipping them with the necessary tools to succeed in the future.

The 28-year-old also opened up about several other topics, including his own past as a player under the orders of THREAT and how he has come full circle becoming Young Ninjas‘ coach while working closely with his former teammate. He also discussed the academy league’s group stage, his team’s initial match-up against fnatic Rising in the LAN finals, the state of the Swedish scene and much more.

You just officially got made coach, but how long had you actually been with Young Ninjas before that happened?

I coached these guys for two months before the announcement, but before that I coached them for like a month, as well. There was a trial period, but I didn’t reach an agreement with NIP about the contract, and I decided to see my other opportunities. I got some other offers, but after that NIP reached out to me and we came to an agreement about the coaching situation.

So tell me a bit about your personal history. I know you spent some time playing with THREAT in Acer and then you went to London Conspiracy. Can you run me a bit through your journey to becoming Young Ninjas’ coach?

Oh, my journey! I started playing with Acer. We were a couple of friends that played a lot together. Me, wenton and kHRYSTAL, back when CS:GO was released, although we started like one year after everyone else. We were playing for fun and then a lot of tournaments started to pop up. We played 1.6 before and we just liked to compete among others. We had Spitfire, as well, he was the only one who played CS:GO from the beginning. So we needed an in-game leader and we called THREAT. We told him, ‘hey, come play CS:GO with us!’ But he was like, ‘uh, no, I’m going to study in Japan in six months.’

Then Acer contacted us and we started playing for Acer, which was a pretty big thing for us because we were just having fun. We loved the game and competing. After that we became better than we expected and when we were as good as we were at the time, THREAT had to leave, so we had some problems there. I still wanted to compete and I got an offer with London Conspiracy, the Norwegian guys, and so I played with them for a while. Then I played with Escape and after that I had a pretty hard time finding a team. I tried out with Epsilon and Red Reserve and everything, but I couldn’t fit into the team. I couldn’t find my role.

I tried everything, in-game leading, supporting, entry-fragging, everything. I just wanted a team to work. Everyone wanted to be the star, it was all star players, and it didn’t work. I pretty much had a free role in Acer, but in my other teams I wasn’t as good as I was in Acer, and I always thought to myself, ‘why?’ And it was because I had really good teammates that set me up. So then I wanted to be that guy for someone else because no one wanted to do it. I tried every role and I think that made it harder for me to find a team because I wasn’t sure so everyone would say ‘I want to hold this, I want to hold that,’ and I just took what was left. That was my way to look at the team, I wanted everyone to be happy and I will take what’s left.

I learned a lot from THREAT when we played together because we were pretty tactical, we tried new stuff with the molotov because back then nobody really played with the molotov. You just didn’t do it. There was one clip from Cache in which we molotoved the whole A site and he brought that with him to NIP and they became really good in Cache. I think we tried and looked at Counter-Strike in a different way than other teams back then. Although it’s like a new game right now, everyone is really good and shooting really hard.

After that I stopped competing and just played for fun with my friends. I focused on working outside of esports. I still watched Counter-Strike and had a lot of friends playing and people asked me for help because I had some experience from the past, so I’ve always tried to help players improve. I jumped in with Begrip, where HEAP was playing and got to know those people and everything like that. Then I helped other teams and people saw me coaching, basically, and so I got contacted by NIP saying that they wanted me to coach their academy team, although I had been gone for like one or two years, not competing and just playing for fun, basically, but I still had good friends in the top tier of the Counter-Strike scene.

Knowing THREAT from the past is really helping me now, because we’re trying to help each other. I can be in their practice, when they practice, and he can be in our practice, so we can help each other to see what we’re doing good or what they’re doing good, or what we’re doing bad… And we can also face each other in practice! When you have two teams you can practice in a different way. For example, you can do only pistol rounds. When you practice normal you play one pistol round on the CT side and one on T, but that’s not enough. So you make a mistake and miss a smoke. Is this a good pistol round or not? You don’t know because the smoke needs to be in the right place. And forcebuys, anti-ecos… We have a busy schedule but we’re trying to get some sessions with each other to help each other improve, and I think that’s really good to have for the future.

Yeah, I was curious about your relationship with the main team and how you make it work.

Yeah, we’re trying. We don’t do it as much as we want to, but we’ll try to do it and we hope to do it more in the future because we have this opportunity to do it. And we have the Young Ninjas, who are pretty good, it’s not that bad if you see the world ranking. We can compete. We’re not as good, of course, but it’s a good opportunity for the young players. We have the office in Stockholm where they can bootcamp and they can sit in the room next to each other and yeah, everything like that.

It’s like this academy league, it’s something good for the future, for the young players to get here, the photo shoot, everything around the event prepares you for the future and if you get there, you’ll know what’s happening. You can see players online and on LAN play differently, you’re like scared, you don’t know what’s happening around you. But it’s the same game, so it shouldn’t be different, but some people perform better on LAN and some perform better online. That’s where I think mental coaches help a lot because most teams need one, this is a mental game. You need to perform, you need to be there. You can see people who have a bad start to a game will play really different from when they get some eco frags or three kills in the pistol. You act differently in game, but it shouldn’t be like that. It’s all in the head, you should always be confident and believe in yourself. So basically I think this academy league is a really big step for the future of esports.

That kind of ties in with something that I wanted to talk about, which is the professionalism of Young Ninjas. How seriously is everything taken by the players. Is this as intense as being on the main team?

From the organization’s side this is a really big thing, we want to have the best academy team, it could have been better from the organization’s side, they haven’t had an academy team before and they’re always trying to improve so we’re really trying to make it as close to the A team as possible, and if we can get THREAT in as well, which he’s really trying to help us we really try to challenge each other in different ways… On paper we have two players from the academy to the A team, ztr and LNZ.

ztr wasn’t what THREAT was looking for and so they swapped, and now we’ll see what piece will fit in the A team, basically. I don’t know anything about who and where and why, that’s on THREAT’s table, I’m just trying to help my players improve and get them ready for the future, basically. Hopefully it’s in NIP, but if not at least they have the basics for the future. LAN experience from these tournaments, playing official games, bootcamps that we can fix in the office. We have everything around them, they just have to focus on the game. That’s what was missing back then, for me, when we started playing, this is what you would have wanted because they get a salary from the beginning, they can just focus on the game.

Do you ever fear that after all of this preparation the players could just go play elsewhere?

Maybe? We don’t know yet. Of course, we want them… Right now, the only Swedish team in the top tier is NIP because fnatic still has three Swedes but they’re going more towards the international team, so I don’t think they’re going to be focusing so much on Swedes.

It’s a big step for the young players as well because it’s a good way into the good team. We’ve already proven that we’ll try out the players if they perform well and work hard, they’ll get a shot if the time is right.

Talking about Sweden, one of the things about the past years is that it’s no longer the same talent factory as in the early days. It seems that less and less Swedish players are making it to the top elite level. So how important is a project like this to foster talent in Sweden?

It’s really important. What we’re missing, because we do have a lot of talent out there, is that they need to understand the game. These days it’s so much about solo-queuing for FPL. They want to be the star player, they’re playing individually, but it’s still a team game and you have to understand the team aspect of the game. If you see the Swedish scene, how many in-game leaders do we have? We had a lot of in-game leaders, but when they got replaced one by one they disappeared, they didn’t go to coaching. Some of them do, but not a lot. And where are they going to learn? We need some in-between, like an academy team.

Look at Denmark, for example. They have a lot of in-game leaders. You had HUNDEN playing, karrigan, gla1ve, MSL, a lot of them. In Sweden we had this, as well, but they stopped playing. We had pronax, Xizt, BARBARR… If they kept playing, like when BARBARR was in Epsilon with REZ and all of those guys, he was teaching them, basically, getting them prepared.

Yeah, he helped bring up Plopski, as well…

Yeah, and you need that, because there are a lot of people that shoot heads and are really good aimers, but you also need the game sense. You need that to play in a team, to play the right type of Counter-Strike. Then you can play differently and you need to find a place to learn that. We need more coaches teaching that, but we don’t have that in Sweden. I wasn’t thinking about doing this, but I can’t stay away from esports. I was always looking and I always wanted to play, but I didn’t have time for it. But I couldn’t stay away from it that long, I really wanted to get back into esports and that’s why when I got the offer I was like, ‘yeah, why not?’ I really like it and it’s really fun.

Going into the LAN itself, how has the team prepared? How have these past few weeks gone?

The past weeks have been pretty weird, I don’t know how to explain it. We have to play the LAN with a different player than we did in the group stage and that affects the team because that’s a pretty big thing and a bit shocking for everyone. So the preparation has been a bit different than expected, but I think it will go well. We have a really good replacement for the finals and I think it will go pretty well.

You had this change you had to make for the LAN, but as an academy team NIP is a bit older than the likes of BIG or fnatic, teams put together right before the start of the league. Do you think that’s a strength your team has?

If you look at the group stage, I believe so, because we had a pretty deep map pool, but it was also easier for them to anti-strat because I know that a lot of teams anti-stratted us. We had a lot of official games, whereas fnatic you couldn’t know what maps they played, what they were good at or not good at…

You literally knew nothing since they were put together a couple days before the event, right?

Yeah, yeah… But I knew they were playing some stuff because I know some of the guys there [laughs]. I felt like us and mouz were the teams to beat in the league and we underestimated some of the teams at the beginning because it’s a best-of-one league and a best-of-one can change a lot if you lose both pistol rounds and the first weapon round… That’s like 0-8 for the other team. So you need to be focused from the beginning of the game.

We threw a lot of games at the beginning of the season, but then we had a talk about how we needed to step up, basically, and then we had like six or seven wins in a row in the second half of the group stage. Our goal was to be top three because we didn’t want to have to play the extra games for the final spot at the LAN. We reached our goal, but now we’re here to win and I believe we have a really good shot to do it.

It seems like, as you said, you and mouz NXT are the teams to beat, them perhaps because of raw individual talent and yourselves because of the more cohesive team aspect…

Looking at the games in the group stage, I believe, in my opinion, that we played the better Counter-Strike. We played more as a team, they have very good individuals and they played really well, but they play more on their skill instead of tactically, basically, which is why I think we have a better shot at winning the LAN. If we still keep doing our rounds but their players might play differently on LAN, if they needed more experience or not…

Well, talking about experience, have your guys played any LANs?

They’ve played some local LANs, but never in another country, never anything like this with a photo shoot, they were pretty nervous before so we’ll see how it goes. But if you have the rounds and you know what you’re going to do and everything, I think it’ll be good, I really think so. From experience, in that first pistol round you’re always a bit nervous, but it’s good to be a bit nervous because you know you care, basically. If you’re not nervous, I don’t know. It’s good to be a bit nervous but you need to embrace it, as well. You can’t be too scared. I think it’ll be the same for all of the teams here, I think everyone will be a bit nervous, a bit scared, so I think it’ll be really nice.

You’re playing fnatic Rising in your first match, how do you feel going up against them?

I feel pretty confident, I know they have a more tactical side because of kevve, I know he wants to play pretty tactical. He’s the analyst for the A team, so he loves to anti-strat teams and I’m sure he’ll do a good job of that with us. So we have to change some things up, otherwise he well know what we do. We have a pretty similar map pool, so I think it will be a pretty good game. In the group stage we always banned three maps and I think that helped them, because they have the smaller map pool, now they can only one ban one before we pick, so we’ll see. It’ll be a really fun game.

So you’ve been working on changing things to not get anti-stratted, they’re trying to get another map in to play mind games in the veto…

I think so, I think so! It’s a bit of a fun game between us as well because we’re always playing about what we’ll pick or what we’ll ban because we know them really well, they’re good friends of ours, so it’s a bit of friendly banter between us. We’re trying to hide our stuff from them, they’re trying to hide their stuff from us… These days we’re seeing them by the practice rooms, which are right besides each other, and we see each other right outside and so it’s really fun, a lot of banter. It’s a really good first match-up.

I think we have a bit of an advantage being all Swedes, because when I see them here I think we have a better group chemistry than some of the other teams. That’s what I thought when I saw them at the photo shoot, I think we have better chemistry and that’s a really good strength to play on LAN.

The team seems to gel in the server, so you’re saying it’s translating out of the server as well.

That’s what we’re trying to do. We had a bootcamp before this to get the feeling and to know each other and do stuff outside of the game because when you know people in real life and you’re in a team you become better. From my experience, when I was in bootcamp, after the bootcamp when you get home, you’re always better because you just know each other in a better way. Online you don’t get to know the person behind the computer and then you don’t understand as much why someone does what they do or maybe sometimes people can take something you say personally because it’s misunderstood…

We have a good group chemistry and we play for each other, not for ourselves. And I think that’s a problem for academy teams, everyone wants to be a star player, to perform and show themselves, but I think we have a pretty good group to help each other because we believe that if the team achieves, we all achieve, not just one player trying to 30-bomb or whatever. I think that’s a problem we have in Counter-Strike in general, it’s so focused on stats, who’s dropping the most, and the lowest guy gets so much blame. But when you look at how many flashes someone has thrown and who goes in first as the entry-fragger, they get left behind. So we’re trying to teach that you can’t achieve without that support player. You can’t win a game alone unless you’re s1mple, basically…

Well, look at m0NESY!

Yeah, exactly! He’s performing really well, but they’re not here, basically. So you need to have a group of players that understands that not everyone can be the star player and I think we have a very good group in that regard.

It seems to me that the organizations with more established academy teams kind of have that better cohesion. NAVI just pulled B1T to the main team, and he had a very particular role that was the role the main team needed. So in an atmosphere like that you can play your role, get recognized by the coach and the players despite not having the top stats, so you don’t need to 30-bomb all of the time. Once we start to have systems that develop young players perhaps there will be more of that and not only the PUG stars shining.

Yeah, and that’s what I mean. We believe in the system, both THREAT and me. We want the tactical aspect of the game because he taught me that when I played with him in Acer. So we think pretty much the same and that’s a pretty good fit for me in NIP and also why I wanted to join, I know him and we get along pretty well.

So basically it has gone full circle, from playing together in Acer to coaching together in NIP.

Yeah, exactly.

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Source: https://www.hltv.org/news/32241/slap-this-academy-league-is-a-really-big-step-for-the-future-of-esports