Bleed coach explains how they landed Valorant superstar yay

In an interview on Donnie ‘Elevated’ Chell’s YouTube channel, Bleed assistant coach Sushant ‘Ominous’ Jha explained the process behind signing Valorant superstar Jaccob ‘yay’ Whiteaker.

Bleed announced the signing of former Cloud9 and Disguised star yay on September 29 and shocked the entire Valorant esports community. The North American player had expressed his desire to return to Tier 1 play in the off-season, but many suspected he would find a roster spot on a VCT Americas team, not move to VCT Pacific.

In an interview with Valorant content creator Elevated, on his YouTube Channel The Elevated Esports Experience, Bleed assistant coach and analyst Ominous talked about the process of signing yay to the VCT Pacific team.

Ominous said pitching yay on a move to Asia to play for a recently promoted squad was hard, but it was made easier due to Bleed’s head coach Nikola ‘LEGIJA’ Ninić’s familiarity with the former Counter-Strike pro.

LEGIJA has a long coaching history in CS:GO in North America and Europe. He is probably best known for his time with BIG in 2018.

“I don’t think [LEGIJA] coached him but they did work together for a while… There was always an understanding between him and yay and yay was actually really looking forward to working with LEGIJA again so that helped us a lot,” Ominous said.

yay signed with Bleed without a tryout

The Bleed coach also explained that the team’s current roster was already signed before it started practicing against other squads. The VCT Pacific team only made two roster changes after earning promotion into the league through the Ascension tournament.

The team parted ways with Marcus ‘Nephh’ Tan and Tyler ‘juicy’ Aeria, then signed Javier ‘Egoist’ Chua and yay.

Elevated explained in the interview that North American teams try out multiple players in practice before deciding to sign someone based on chemistry and feel. Ominous said that process doesn’t work logistically when teams are signing players from other countries.

“Let’s say we had signed [yay] first, to try him out we would have to fly him all the way from the U.S. to Singapore just to try out scrims. Even the players we were looking at before are from different parts of APAC or from Europe… and it logistically doesn’t make sense for you to fly them out for a trial and if it doesn’t work you fly them back,” Ominous said.

The Bleed coach also touched on how yay’s absence from top-level play, and disastrous time with Disguised in the North American Challengers League, didn’t dissuade the team from signing him.

“We did have conversations with him prior to signing him and much of what happened at DSG was, I would say, not in his hands, not in his control. And as for stats, I think he did pretty well in the kind of team he was in, in the amount of matches he lost. I think he did quite well statistically in those matches,” Ominous said.

Fans will have to wait and see what yay will look like on Bleed Esports in VCT Pacific as the team is not slated to appear at any off-season events, and the season is months away from kicking off.