April 2, 2026

I'm currently working on a video where I interview my team's coach about why they got into coaching, their pedagogy, what inspires them, etc. and during the scripting stage there was something that popped out to me that I wanted to talk about.

Since the beginning, Mesopelagic has always had a coach. We filled out our roster and less than two weeks later we recruited our first coach to the team. We had six members on the team at the time, and half of our roster was completely new to comp, with one of our members having over 1k hours of [turf war] and their tryout with us being the first time they touched the anarchy modes. The other half had been playing comp from anywhere from 6–12 months, but both of those experiences were somewhat poor ones. None of us had experienced what it was like to have a coach, and our first coach was closer in skill-level as we were.

But I'm not writing this thread to painstakingly detail every moment of coaching we ever got. Rather, I wanted to talk about why I believe a significant portion of teams (low-level teams especially) jump the gun a lot when it comes to recruiting coaches. Going back to talk about Mesopelagic: we had no clue what we wanted our of competitive Splatoon. Our first team meeting about our goals was basically "get to mid-level" and that was the extent... which wasn't really a good goal. And since our first coach had never gotten out of low-level, they weren't aware of the tools needed to get to that level of play. We were all pretty naïve starting out, which meant that we had no clue what we actually wanted out of the game. Which meant that over time, there became a disconnect between what we wanted and what our coach wanted for us.

As our roster shifted and we became more engrossed in what the competitive scene was like and what we actually wanted out of the game, Mesopelagic wanted to explore more off-meta/coolerless comps, whereas our coach wanted us to stick with a more standard comp (pen/slosher/dualies/forge was the main one at the time).

Which brings me to my main point: teams often recruit coaches too early, when they have a lack of cohesion, are unaware of what their goals are, and rely too much on external guidance.

I'll address each point individually.

• Newer teams lack cohesion

In our case, we prioritized bringing in a coach to help us gain an edge early on. But because we didn't have a team identity, lots of the strategies we tried to implement didn't always work, and there was lots of butting heads between our members and our coach over what we wanted and what worked. Team identities are crucial for understanding everyone's individual styles be it how they communicate, how they play their role, how they learn best, and how much commitment they want to give.

• Newer teams might have misaligned goals

Maybe this is the exact same as the above, but I want to reiterate how important it is to talk about how low-level teams often don't know what they want out of the competitive scene. Mesopelagic has gone through various roster changes in the year we've been around purely because over time some of our members realized that what they wanted out of comp was different not only from what the others wanted, but also from what the coach wanted as well.

Our identity as a team evolved slowly over the first few months we were together, but once we reached about six months as a team we really started to develop our own individual identities and goals, and that really changed things around. Our coach's philosophy stayed the same, while ours changed a lot. It caused some conflict between everyone, and that's never fun to deal with. I have to honestly say that I think part of our progress during this time stagnated because of this disconnect: the strategies our coach was using to help us weren't aligned with what we wanted, and so it just didn't work.

• Teams over-rely on external guidance

I feel like a lot of teams end up relying way too heavily on their coaches to learn. Maybe this is part of internet culture as a whole now, I can't say for sure, but I feel like lots of teams expect and are okay with being fed information instead of seeking it out themselves. Developments in team identity and ability should happen naturally, but relying on someone to tell you what to do only stifles that growth.

I wonder if part of it is that there's this idea that if you're "wrong" you're just a "low-level scrub"? So people are afraid of doing/saying the wrong thing and coming off as ignorant. This isn't a problem unique to the competitive scene of course, but I think that people should be encouraged to be wrong, that they should be more encouraged to make mistakes, and then they go to the coach with their own understanding of their weaknesses.

• Teams can suffer from instability due to hierarchy struggles

This one might be a bit more... harsh? I'm not sure how to describe it. But something I've been happen before is teams that recruit a coach too quickly might have a sort of... power struggle? Especially if the team is relying on the coach too much. The coach might expect more "obedience" (I can't think of a better word here) from the team, and as the team develops their own ideas that can cause things to clash.

Again, this isn't something that I've seen happen often, it's more of a hypothetical based on the above scenarios I've been talking about. Something to think about, I suppose.

• And the most important: a coach can't help you if you can't help yourself

Coaches can provide so many strategies, tips, and tricks, but if a team doesn't grasp fundamentals or if they don't understand each other, then they might not be able to implement that advice at all. There's lots of feedback a coach can offer, but players on a team should be able to self-reflect on their own gameplay individually. It goes back to my bullet point of over-reliance.

That about wraps up my yap-a-thon. My overall thoughts are mostly that I think it's really important for teams to form their own identity and their own ideas before they go out there looking for a coach. Obviously this happens at a different pace for everyone (it could be two weeks, it could be two months). Mesopelagic got a new coach about two months ago, and these are some of the things we've talked about regarding the differences between our experiences with coaching when we first started as a team compared to now.

We know more about ourselves, about each other, and I feel like we're able to implement the advice and feedback we get from our current coach more effectively because we understand what our team identity is.

My other piece of advice for folks is to not get married to one coach. You can part ways with them, and you should never take all of their coaching as law, even if they're top level and you're fresh to the scene. Listen, interoperate, and learn through your own experimentation.

I feel like, personally, what stunted Meso's growth for so long is because the teaching style of our first coach did not mesh with us. But in our case, since so many of us were new to the scene, we didn't really know what coaching was supposed to be like (which is what inspired my video/this thread...) so we just stuck with it for so long.

The difference between our first coach and our second coach is that we are allowed to disagree and have actual discussions about concepts with the latter. Sometimes we're just completely wrong of course, but that allows us to learn on our own terms which tends to stick more.

It might be the one-trick in me, but one yellow flag in a coach is them insisting on changing your comp instead of finding ways to make it work, or at the very least entertaining it. Unless you're top level, your concerns probably aren't your weapons, but your fundamentals. Obviously suggestions are fine, but something like "you HAVE to play xyz or you won't make it out of low level"? Run for the hills.

Honestly, I would say that's less of a yellow flag and more of an orange flag, if not outright a red flag. Like you said, suggestions are just fine, but it goes back to one of the points that I made in my thread: teams are fed information instead of being directed to that conclusion themselves. In low-level especially, weapon choice barely matters. Obviously you want to think about how your weapons will work together and choose ones that can pair up well, but things are usually decided based on decision-making and mechanics where we are. If we were put onto a pen/splash/stamper/slosher comp, we wouldn't instantly shoot up to division 3 or anything like that. We still need to learn the fundamentals.

We're actively encouraged and allowed to experiment with weapons that are seen as being worse wiper deco yay!) and I think that's helped us with our game knowledge and awareness. We aren't doing as much experimenting as of late since we've all found weapons that are comfortable, but when we were experimenting I feel as though we were learning more about the game because we had to think about it from a completely different perspective than what we had been playing initially. We had to think from different angles, take fights differently, and that has allowed us to be able to adapt against other comps that might be more unconventional.