*By Jimmy Mondal* Will “wiill” Sims, in-game leader of the NobleGG team that recently qualified for the NPL preseason, started gaming as a League of Legends player in 2012. But his League of Legends skills didn’t foreshadow his later esports success. “I was never personally that good,” he told Cheddar Sports with a laugh, “so I ended up just trying the coaching route.” Sims continued to coach and manage League of Legends, he says, until Riot Games started to franchise out and he realized his chances of getting in without the connections or accolades that some of his peers possessed were slim. At this point, he was looking for a game that was “accessible and something that you could get into early.” He realized that getting to a game late makes it harder to gain access to its inner circle and advance. That’s when he discovered PUBG, right as it was first announced. Sims jumped into the competitive scene in February, eventually playing in amateur 2v2 tournaments with some semi-professionals who happened to be missing team members for a full-on four-player squad. After gaining experience through the amateur circuit and proving himself to the semi-professional community, he started to make connections to members of the NobleGG squad. However, Sims didn’t have the experience of some of the other players. Although PUBG was his first first-person shooter game, Sims was able to prove his value by using the analytical and leadership skills he picked up while coaching League of Legends ー like “how to apply strategies, how to make a team work together, how to make people mesh.” When coming to PUBG, he said he asked himself: “What other avenue can I approach to make myself valuable to the team? What can I offer? “And it came down to the intellectual side of the game ーbeing able to use strategies, being able to adapt and think on the fly and being able to adjust to the situation,” he said adding, “which is what battle royale’s all about.” Sims qualified with his team for the upcoming National PUBG League. Preseason starts in mid-January.
