League of Legends: Remembering the Trials of Team Coast
The first year
Coast came into the scene under the name of Good Game University, forming in the primordial dawn of the first LCS split. Though some of their squad – Danny “Shiphtur” Le and Darshan “ZionSpartan” Upadhyaya – had a bit of name recognition, it wasn’t clear what we should expect from the team.
From the very beginning, the squad showed their propensity for the redemption narrative. They started off their first season (keep in mind that seasons were then 28 games) by dropping to the bottom of the barrel with a 2-12 record. However, the team rallied with the addition of Miles “Daydreamin” Hoard, flipping their scoreline to a respectable 11-17 and eking their way into playoffs.
Once in playoffs, the team began to tear through their competition. They started with a 2-1 upset over Dignitas, who many had pegged as the challenger to the TSM menace. Then they ran over Curse – also a 2-1 series – who everyone else had pegged as the challenger to the TSM menace. Finally, in the foyer of success, the team faced off against the TSM menace themselves.
And, though no one would know it until the team eventually disbanded in 2016, this would be the closest that Coast – still just GGU at this point – would ever come to winning, well, anything.
Though they fell to TSM in a close 5-game series, team GGU did the rest of the LCS proud – showing that League of Legends would have a lot of new surprises in store with the introduction of the Regional Championship Series. After all, this was a young team with a lot to prove, and they had shown up huge in their first-ever split. Surely they would return in Summer to really stamp their seal on the region.
Right?
Well, the team certainly stamped something on the region. Came in and tracked it all over the house, if you know what I’m saying…
All of summer didn’t suck, though. The team looked solid through their first half, before rolling down a hill mid-season – a hill that ended in the ravine of a seven-game losing streak. The Summer Split ended with a 9-19 record, and just like that, Coast was in their first-ever relegation tournament!
In this tournament, the newly-branded Team Coast was forced to face off against a tough squad – The Walking Zed – who would go on to be 4/5 of the Cloud9 Tempest crew. And though this was their second best-of-five series in so many splits, the tension could be cut with a knife. Would Coast go on to flub out of the region they had come close to ruling just a few short months before?
Again, the series came down to its fifth game. Yet this time Coast emerged victorious, taking down the Zed and locking in their spot for the 2014 season. With the fire of a hard-fought preseason series under them, they were ready for anything.