Cloud9 Valorant coach doubles down on role issues for vanity and yay exit

Cloud9 Valorant head coach Matthew ‘mCe’ Elmore doubled down in an interview on role issues being the main reason for Jaccob ‘yay’ Whiteaker and Anthony ‘vanity’ Malaspina’s exit from the team at the start of the VCT season.

In an interview the Wyatt River, Cloud9 Valorant head coach mCe talked about his team’s year in VCT along with yay and vanity’s surprise exit from the squad early on in the season.

Under mCe, Cloud9 placed second in the VCT Americas regular season, going 8-1, and were one series away from qualifying for VCT Masters Tokyo and Valorant Champions 2023 in the playoff stage. The team placed third in the VCT Americas LCQ and Cloud9’s only international showing, VCT LOCK//IN, saw them place in the top 16.

Cloud9 confirmed that yay was off the squad on March 1, 2023, and then revealed that vanity was also out of the team less than two weeks later. When asked about the internal response to the news from the squad, mCe revealed that he and the team were frustrated by the moves.

“We knew potentially one change was going to happen because of everything going on, but the other one definitely caught us off guard,” the C9 coach said. “I think we had a couple weeks before we started, or a couple months, at that point were we were put under a pretty rough situation to come out on top of.”

Cloud9 coach delves into yay and vanity exit as 2023 VCT season has ended

mCe also doubled down on role issues being the main reason for the changes on Cloud9. He detailed how he had to help yay break some bad habits from spending the previous year playing mainly Chamber for OpTic and how the player wasn’t proficient on other Duelists like Neon and Raze.

mCe also said that yay was “his own player” and would put his own spin on set ups that the coaching staff crafted for him.

“He’s a very particular player in the way that he wants to play and it can be frustrating to deal with sometimes,” mCe said. “So the whole role issues not existing is just not true.”

The coach also said that the squad has had role issues since it dropped Son “xeta” Seon-ho in May 2022 mainly due to their lack of a true Sova player.

“It was a bigger thing than those two players,” he said.

Cloud9 would eventually bring in Dylan ‘runi’ Cade and Jake ‘jakee’ Anderson to replace vanity and yay. mCe said in the interview that he had to have the other members of the team buy into the changes in order for it to work post-yay and vanity exit and that he would find ways for them to leave if they wanted.

“I told them: ‘With the rookies our attitudes need to be better because whatever you guys are like our rookies will turn into those people. Because they are brand new and they are going to look up to you guys,'” he said.

mCe also said the new additions brought a level of flexibility to C9 that wasn’t there before and this allowed them to play compositions that the previous iteration of the roster probably could not have pulled off.

Cloud9 is about to hit the ground running in the VCT 2023-24 off-season as they will look to replace Jordan ‘Zellsis’ Montemurro, who announced his was an unrestricted free-agent on September 9, and potentially restructure their roster.