The promising season of Team Dignitas EU just came to an abrupt end.
Chres “Sencux” Laursen, 16, and similarly youthful Martin “Wunderwear” Hansen were ruled unable to compete in the Challenger Series playoffs due a change in the age restriction for the next season of the League Championship Series (LCS), despite being allowed to compete all season long.
Today the team moved to ensure the success of their next challenger bid, now that budding superstar Sencux and friends are of age.
The team added veteran challenger jungler Dennis “Obvious” Sørensen and support player Nicolai Nisbeth to the lineup, giving the squad a new all-Danish look similar to their Danish Counter-Strike team.
Former jungler Ram “Brokenshard” Djemal moves to the head coach position, a place where he’s not unfamiliar after flitting between a number of teams since visa issues kept him from competing in the LCS with Complexity in the summer of last year.
Nisbeth started for Meet Your Makers during the first half of their ill-fated run to relegation in the Spring split and did not perform well, getting benched after six weeks, but no one did on that team during his stint there. He joins the Dignitas lineup with a solid pedigree as a consistent mechanical force in solo queue.
Sørensen, a veteran of challenger teams like Gamers2 and n!Faculty, should provide a mechanical upgrade over the man he replaced, his new coach.
“Team synergy was somewhat of an issue in the last split,” Djemal said of the changes. “We could see that even though we had some very capable, individually skilled players, we lacked coordination in important teamfights and late game shotcalling which ultimately led us to lose many games which could easily have been won.”
Nisbeth, he says, will aid in making those calls and should improve that ailing synergy; he’s already friends with a few of his new teammates.
Coaching is an increasingly popular role for former players of the ill-fated Complexity team, like Djemal, who fell in relegations after the Summer split of the NA LCS. Former Complexity mid laner Neil “Pr0lly” Hammad led H2k Gaming to a surprising top four finish in the EU LCS this season, earning Coach of the Split honors.
Dignitas and H2k aren’t the only teams employing former Complexity pros. Today Team Fusion revealed support player Royce “Bubbadub” Newcomb, famed for his brilliant moustache, will join the squad as an analyst.
While Newcomb is a relative newcomer to the role, Djemal has prior coaching experience. He spent the Summer split last year as a coach on Gamers2 and even coached alongside Hammad for H2k Gaming during the expansion tournament in December 2015. Now, if all goes well for Djemal, he may meet Hammad in the LCS at the start of 2016.
“My task was simple: Make all the necessary changes needed to make sure that our lineup was poised to dominate the EU challenger series and in turn make it into the LCS,” Djemal said. “With the full backing of the Team Dignitas staff and organization, as well as the excellent support staff and motivation that the players have, we feel that these changes are exactly what we need moving forward to make Team Dignitas EU a competitive team moving forward in the summer split.”
With no pesky age restriction holding them back, Dignitas looks like a favorite in the challenger scene.
