League of Legends: Remembering the Trials of Team Coast

A Familiar Coast

Long past were the champagne days of the two first-place series, of the nearly-undefeated streak through the rest of the challenger competition. They had fallen, sure enough, from the very precipice of professional League of Legends back to the long and treacherous path through the Challenger Series. Yet even in this pit, they had climbed swiftly, then more slowly at the end. Still, they were here, at the very last rung of the ladder, tired and dogged and ready to return to their rightful place.

It didn’t matter if they were first or third, the caliber of players they had lost during relegations, the last-minute hurdles that had been thrown their way. Coast had come to play.

I’d like to end it all here. The entire Coast storyline is much too long to lay out in a single post, and I think that’s a good thing. Coast would go on to sub out two of their players – Greyson “Goldenglue” Gilmer and Keenan “Rhux” Santos – for a couple of Korean nonstarters. The move seems to have crushed the morale of the team – along with a soured community sentiment – and the team lost 0-3 to the NA chapter of Evil Geniuses.

But even this wasn’t the end for Coast’s hectic season. The miracle that was the 2015 Spring Expansion Tournament – adding two additional LCS spots for the 2015 Spring Split — gave them one last hail-Mary back into the LCS. And boy, did they take it!

Back in the LCS, the pattern basically repeated itself in its entirety once more, as Coast returned to the professional League of Legends with the worst split a team has ever had in the LCS (and maybe in League of Legends history). Their 1-17 record shot them directly back into Challenger, where they climbed dutifully back through the many trials outlined in their first ascension, eventually snagging another spot for themselves.

Throughout all the crazy swings and ups-and-downs, there runs a narrative we can all identify with. That terrible feeling that we have a mountain to climb – be it physical, mental or moral – all in pursuit of an indistinct future. That the challenges may prove too great for us, that the air at the summit may be too thin for us to catch our breath. That we may well reach the summit, only to find our view obscured by cryptic clouds, only to spot another peak rearing out of fog, that much steeper and less likely. That the only thing we can do is put one foot in front of the other, and hope we’re headed in the right direction.

Coast may not have cut it in professional League of Legends, and their herculean effort to reach the spot – their original starting point, even – may have ended in folly. After all, besides their first split, the team went 9-19 and 1-17; records more worthy of being buried deep underground than touted to the masses. But credit where it is due: no team tried harder when it was at its lowest – no team had a harder road to walk, and walked it twice!

If effort alone was a metric for success, Coast would have hoisted the trophy.

Interested in seeing any other postmortems of the teams you miss? Remember watching
Coast during their Challenger runs? Leave a comment below!