Photo by Azubu.tv
A new North American Challenger Series team enters the fray helmed with a mix of veteran NA talent and strong Korean players. Team Apex looks to dominate the NACS this season.
Brandon “Saintvicious” DiMarco is an iconic figure in the NA League Championship series, taking part in several high level teams such as Team SoloMid, Curse, and most recently coaching for Team Coast. After Coast was bought out by the Sacramento Kings to form NRG eSports, it was unknown where Saint was headed for the 2016 season.
Today, Saintvicious announced via Twitter that a new NA challenger team known as Apex will be entering the season, being coached by himself. The full roster is as follows:
Top: Cristian “Cris” Rosales(formerly of Coast)
Jungle: Jun-cheol “Eve” Seo(formerly of Samsung Galaxy)
Mid: Lae-Yeong “Keane” Jang(formerly of Gravity Gaming)
Attack Damage Carry: Hyeong-gi “Police” Park(formerly of Ever)
Support: Alex “Xpecial” Chu(formerly of Liquid)
Assistant Coaches: Byeong-hoon “Shrimp” Lee(formerly of Coast) and Jong-won “BlisS” Park(formerly of Samsung Galaxy)
A team such as this has quite a lot of potential. Many different members of this team have past experiences with one another. Saint worked previously with Cris, Xpecial, Keane, and Shrimp, all of whom had solid performances in 2015. Cris even showed his strength during week one of the LCS when subbing as NRG’s top laner in a game to defeat Dignitas. The imported Koreans talent will also be a beneficial asset, as the former Coast players have worked bilingually before between English and Korean to achieve success.
After coming off a solid 2nd place finish in the previous NACS split, it will be interesting to see if Saintvicious and the rest of the former Coast players will be able to work together this season. With the addition of star players such as Xpecial and Keane, this will surely be one challenger team to keep an eye on.
