Boston Uprising remove 2 assistant coaches, add more staff

Out with the old, in with the new.

Photo by Robert Paul via Blizzard Entertainment
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The Boston Uprising join the myriad of Overwatch League teams making serious coaching changes in the offseason. The team released two assistant coaches, Jordan “Gunba” Graham and Jackson “Shake” Kaplan, today. But they’ve added a new assistant coach in Ilias “iLka” Kaskanetas.

In September, the Boston Uprising announced the acquisition of Vytis “Mineral” Lasaitis as the team’s head coach. Mineral was the former head coach of the Florida Mayhem, who recently made some coaching changes as well. As the Boston Uprising move to their home city in 2020, they seem to upending their management department.

Assistant coach Gunba announced his free agency over a month ago, including fellow assistant coach Shake in the announcement. Gunba is a former Los Angeles Valiant assistant coach and coached Team Australia in the 2018 Overwatch World Cup. Shake was previously a support player for Overwatch teams like CLG and Complexity. He’s spent the past two years coaching the Boston Uprising.

In his Twitter post, Gunba revealed that both he and Shake were only assistant coaches and that the Boston Uprising “head coach role has been vacant for over a year at this point” as of Sept. 4.

New assistant coach ILka comes with a host of achievements from his time in Overwatch Contenders. He was most recently the head coach of Angry Titans, who participated in the Atlantic Contenders Showdown. Before that, ILka coached with ATL Academy, the Atlanta Reign’s North American Overwatch Contenders academy team.  

In 2020, the Boston Uprising will host two homestands in their home city.

Author
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Liz Richardson
Liz is a freelance writer and editor from Chicago. Her favorite thing is the Overwatch League; her second favorite thing is pretending iced coffee is a meal. She specializes in educational content, patch notes that (actually) make sense, and aggressively supporting Tier 2 Overwatch. When she's not writing, Liz is expressing hot takes on Twitter and making bad life choices at Target.