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Evil Geniuses have announced the promotion of Soham “valens” Chowdhury to director of athletics for the organization’s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive team. Valens will head all 15 CS:GO players within the franchise in his capacity as the director of athletics.
The 32-year-old had been working within EG’s CS:GO team for well over two years as the organization’s head of data science. He will now become the Counter-Strike director of athletics, making the final decisions as it relates to everything Counter-Strike.
Before joining the North American esports organization, Valens was working with Cloud9 in the capacity of a coach and a data scientist. In 2019, he led Cloud9 to win the ELEAGUE Boston Major title. He spent about two years and eight months with Cloud9 before making his way to join the 2020 BLAST Premier: Spring American champion in November 2019.
Valens reacted to his new position, describing it as a fancy name for a general with a background/experience in data science. He stated that he will be working closely with the former team he was heading, the data science department. He also revealed he will be handling the team’s needs as it relates to scouting new players and the evaluation of current players.
“I think it’s a pretty fancy name for basically a general manager combined with someone who has that experience to bring in the data side of things,” valens said.
“I’ll be working very closely with the data science team that I was leading, and also do typical GM duties as well, so things like scouting for new players and evaluating our current players properly.”
Valens’ promotion comes two weeks after Evil Geniuses unveiled their 15-man roster, which was tagged ‘the Blueprint project’. The roster was made up by the signing of the Party Astronauts and Carpe Diem rosters. These new players join Timothy “autimatic” Ta and Jake “Stewie2K” to make up the supposedly “fluid” team. These multiple changes point to the organization’s goal for the near future and the direction it’s looking to take.
Bringing Valens to the forefront having spent over a year in the background and the formation of a 15-man roster speaks volumes about EG’s goal for CS:GO. While most franchises maintain only five core players, a few have expanded rosters, but EG’s move for a 15-man roster has never been done before.
It will be interesting to see how Valens makes the best use of the arsenal available to him. With his role as the director of athletics, coupled with his previous experience in data science, the onus falls on him to determine which players feature for what tournaments, as he is in charge of roster changes. While the players and coaching staff will have input, Valens makes the final decision.
According to Valens, the 15-man roster will be split into three teams with their individual coaching staff. With this setup, the team can focus on building different specialties amongst the various teams, making them a lot more threatening to play against.
