This post is a demo of the styled title — the strikethrough on Esports and the accent treatment on Greatness above are set entirely in frontmatter via titleHTML. No global CSS was changed.
In 2024 I coached the Edgewood High School esports team to a WIHSEA State Championship. It mirrored an All-State win I had as a player in 2022 — same game, same conference, opposite side of the relationship.
The strange thing about coaching esports at the high school level is that the game is almost incidental. You spend maybe 20% of your time talking about mechanics or strategy. The rest is everything else: managing tilt, building communication between teammates who don’t naturally talk to each other, getting a 15-year-old to stop blaming his teammates and start asking what he could do differently.
The thing about “just play better”
Most esports coaching at the youth level stops at “just play better.” Watch your replays. Aim train. Rank up. The problem is that this treats the team as five individuals who happen to share a server. It misses the actual leverage point — which is that a team that communicates well and stays calm under pressure will beat a team of individually better players almost every time at the collegiate and high school level.
What I was coaching wasn’t Overwatch. It was the stuff underneath it: how to give feedback without making someone defensive, how to reset after a bad fight, how to stay present when you’re losing.
The part that carried over
The skills I brought to that coaching role came almost entirely from the broadcast side of my esports work, not the competitive side. Running a live production for 20+ events — where something is always going wrong and you have to stay composed, adapt, and keep the show moving — taught me more about working under pressure than any rank climb did.
That’s the thing I kept coming back to when I was coaching. The game teaches you very little about performing under pressure by itself. The structure around the game — the stakes, the communication requirements, the failure modes — is where the real learning happens.
On winning
We won. It was great. I was proud of them.
But the part I remember most isn’t the trophy. It’s a player who spent the first half of the season refusing to use voice chat — not because he didn’t want to communicate, but because he was scared to say the wrong thing — talking his team through a clutch round in the semifinal without a second thought.
That’s the rep that transferred.
This is a demo post showing the titleHTML frontmatter feature — the styled title above renders as plain text everywhere else (page tab, OG tags, post cards).