The Rise of Ecko Esports

As this is my first blog, I figured I’d give a quick introduction to myself. For those you don’t know me, my name is Jordan “Zenabi” Fighera, I am 20 Years Old and I currently run an Australian based esports team Ecko Esports.

The Beginning

Almost two years ago now, I decided to make a very important decision (for me) in my life. I played Starcraft 2 A LOT, but hadn’t really achieved anything as a player, my skill level was never really high enough to do so. It got to the stage where I didn’t want to play anymore, but still wanted to be active in the scene. So i decided to create a team. At the time, there where a few teams in the SEA scene already, notably Xeria Gaming, Team Immunity, Carnage Esports, but comparatively there was still a large amount of untapped potential.

My journey started way back in September 2012, where i initially toyed with the idea of making a Starcraft 2 team. I talked to a few friends of mine that ran NaZGaming (a clan back in the day) and Nick “Spartaz” Simpson about the idea, and received a large amount of support from them to pursue the idea further. I knew it wouldn’t be easy creating a team from scratch, but it was more difficult then I imagined. You see, players don’t want to join teams unless they are offered something, particularly from sponsors. Sponsors on the other hand, don’t want to sponsor teams without players or results. I was stuck on this merry-go-round for about 6 months, approaching players on the idea of forming a team, then trying to contact sponsors about the team; picking a team name, getting a logo, etc.

In hindsight, approaching sponsors before you even have a team up is a MAJOR waste of time, but remember at this stage I had 0 experience doing such a thing.

The Initial Squad

I worked very hard on planning my team at this stage, going through all the potential talent that I thought could amount to something at the time. At the time, I had approached the likes of NXZ, Syntox, Namakaye, Lobo, Saviour, and probably a few more that I can’t remember off the top of my head. A lot of the guys actually expressed interest, but didn’t want to commit to something that hadn’t even gotten off the ground yet.

By the time Ecko Esports started getting somewhere, teams where being announced left right and centre. Team ToR had partnered with Avant Garde in October, Seraphic Nexus was announced in November, followed shortly by Team Desperation Move, and Qlimax Crew shortly into the new year. With this, a lot of talent was picked up, in particular a lot of the guys I was looking into for Ecko Esports.

Giving Up

In about February, I was ready to give up. A lot of my hard work had amounted to nothing, and I was really beginning to think it wasn’t worth continuing with it. Luckily for me at the time, good friend of mine Kevin “Kreamy” Luangkhoth talked to me about it and convinced me to keep going with it. Which basically resulted in him committing to joining the team. This gave me a new will to keep working hard and build a strong team together. After countless talks with Kevin about potential players, we finally decided to add Sean “Probe” Kempen and Fergus “Shampoo” Brown to the team.

In that time, we also managed to get WASD Keyboards to come on board with helping us as a team. The initial agreement was to offer us a discount on keyboards for the team, and then as Ecko Esports improved, WASD would sponsor us fully. This was an amazing breakthrough for me, though they didn’t offer much, it was some form of support, and I started to feel all my efforts were paying off.

* Unfortunately in a few months time, WASD signed with Axiom and could not find the room in their funds to adequately sponsor us, resulting in the partnership to be terminated.

Announcing Ecko Esports

On April 8th 2013, we finally announced Ecko Esports to the public. We had a 3-man team, a website, all the appropriate social media outlets set up, and it felt FANTASTIC. The amount of support we received from the public was outstanding, and I couldn’t feel prouder of myself to have actually accomplished such a feat, though it took me much longer then i expected. Around this time, Silicon Sports, and Myth Esports also announced their Starcraft 2 squads, with Avant Garde picking up the old Qlimax crew. The Starcraft 2 scene in SEA had a plethora of competition, and things where looking up for the scene.

The next few months was solely based on adding players to the team, and by September, we had finalised, what looked like to me, a strong competitive squad. Kevin, Fergus, and Sean were still on the squad, and we also added John “Tazerenix” McCarthy, Andrew “Switch” Roberts, Billy “FLuX” Weeks, Mikael “Schnitzel” Koch, and Henry “RivaL” Yum.

We had little success at this stage, losing our first ever clan war to ToR, before beating Seraphic Nexus with Probe reverse-all killing their team cue #probetoallkill (-1), and basically no individual results at that time.

Ecko Rebuild

Around October – December, we saw half of our squad leave. Billy was the first to go, leaving to create his on New Zealand-based team CheckMate Gaming. Kevin followed shortly after, taking the opportunity to join the Frenetic Array Academy. Andrew and John both decided to leave the team, as they had stopped playing the game altogether, and Fergus went missing (we have reason to believe ByuN heard about Fergus’ MIA, and took inspiration from it).
*If anyone has seen or has information on Fergus Brown’s whereabouts, please contact me.

This left us with only 4 players left on our squad. As we still wanted to participate in Clan Wars, we decided to add Leo “ChoboSniper” Lai to the team after some impressive performances in the ESL Oceania Team Cup.

ESL Oceania Team Cup Summer

This event was basically our first (and at this stage only) real competition as a team. Placed in Group A, we had to battle the strong partnerships of Silicon Sports + SYF Gaming, Frenetic Array + Avant Garde, Team Nv, Power Rangers, Team ToR, Team Oddie, and AxiS.

I don’t really have much to say about this team league, we performed ok, but the management of the league itself was pretty poor, with Team Nv, Power Rangers, and eventually ourselves deciding to pull out of the tournament as a result. To this day, I don’t think it was ever completed.

SYF Summer LAN 2014

The SYF Summer LAN 2014 was my first ever time meeting the Ecko Esports guys in person, I flew to Melbourne on the Friday, and stayed their until the Tuesday and honestly, I loved Melbourne, and can’t wait to go back for ACL Melbourne (Baldie pls announce soon).

One Year Anniversary

Around this time, we celebrated our one year anniversary. We had recently re-added Kevin to team, and brought with us Frenetic Array Academy Terrans Edmond “Redemption Lam and Ben “Pokemon” Lam (no, they are not related), Sean and Henry had both been getting very good results, including all kills and placing highly at LAN events, and the team was starting to really cement itself as a major team in the SEA scene. It was around this time we also added Marc “Buffalo” McArtur to Management and Alan “Apoc” Yan to the Social Media.

It was around this time that Ecko Esports started to waver a little.

The Troubling Months

When people look at Ecko Esports, for the most part they see a happy team, run based more on friendship and enjoyment rather then as a professional organisation, with some terms like “indie-team” thrown around. I particularly don’t mind being referred to like this; we don’t pay our players a salary, we don’t force them to practice every second day, nor did we have any sponsors at that time (though we had been in talks with Katana Gaming Systems for a while now).

When we added Marc to the team, I had a lot of people message me and talk to me about it, making sure I knew what I was doing, and overall having a concern over the issue. For me, that was both incredible and worrying; incredible the amount of support that a bunch of people had shown, and worrying that so many people messaged me about it. But I am not one to judge a book by its cover, and I took on the challenge.

There were some early teething problems, but overall working with Marc was a success; he helped bring Chan Kim to the team, as well as academy players Kane “Enak” Brickell and James “MrLando” Laszlo. At this stage, we had some very minor disputes in the team, with in-house fighting as well as a lot of commotion about ACL Sydney.

Due to his own personal commitments, Marc had to leave Ecko Esports. I had mixed emotions about this, I was sad to see him go, as he worked rather hard at making Ecko Esports the best it could be, and showed nothing but good intentions. But at the same time I was glad to have the team in my own hands once again. There is a blissfulness about working by yourself on something that means so much to you, and to have that feeling once again growing inside me is amazing.

Breaking the Bank

Throughout our first year, Ecko Esports didn’t provide too much to our team. We got them keyboards from WASD, some temporary team shirts, and paid for their LAN entry fees. 2014 saw us invest more into our team, paying for our players flights to LAN events (Mikael to SYF Summer LAN, and Leo to ACL Brisbane).

ACL Sydney saw three of our players (Sean, Mikael, and Leo) qualify for the group stage for the very first time. Kevin and Henry also wanted to go to ACL Sydney to participate in the Open Bracket. Much of the dispute was based solely on who we would be funding to go to ACL Sydney, as none of the players lived in Sydney. There was a lot of arguing and discussion about fairness and results in terms of sending players.

Marc and I worked overtime to figure out how many we could afford to send to ACL Sydney, and we managed to find the funds to pay for 4 of our players flights in full, pay for over half of our 5th players flights, as well as pay for everyone’s entry fees.

ACL Sydney was largely a success for us, with everyone making Groups, and Henry and Sean making the Playoff stages, albeit being eliminated in 7th-8th place. It wasn’t until after the event that I realised we had broken our bank.

The way we tend to pay for players flights is players organise and pay the flights, send me a copy of the receipt, and we refund them the full cost. We haven’t had any issues with this system and the players have had no issues with it. Until maybe now.

I don’t wish to go too much into details, but ACL Sydney hurt us. Ecko Esports didn’t pay some of our players flights until weeks after the event and had already guaranteed another players flights to our LAN event in Adelaide, which is also taking some money out of the bank. We usually pay for everything before the event happens, and the fact that we failed to do that this time worried me.

Some might wonder as to why I am bringing this out in public, when its an internal issue and could be dealt with easily. I don’t like owing people money, nor do I like breaking promises. I also pride myself and my team on being as honest and transparent as possible. If I am going to run a successful team, I believe I have to be honest and keep people in the loop as to what is happening in the team. This is also a way for me to keep myself honest, as I don’t wont to become one of those cliche managers that ends up breaking everyone’s balls and doesn’t keep promises. I have talked to those involved and they were fine with the delays (this is another reason why I love my team to bits), which I am grateful for.

This for me saw my first real mistake as a manager, and is something that I am not very proud of. At the time, we had calculated that we could afford everything + organising our own LAN event in Adelaide. The LAN is going ahead 100% and the outstanding fees should be covered in the near future.

Coming through the other side

The past few months have been crazy for me. Organising ACL Sydney stuff, starting the academy team, organising the LAN, as well as things outside of esports have taken their toll on me, and left me a bit burnt out.

I am looking forward to the next month or so after the Adelaide LAN, where I get to relax a bit, and once again enjoy myself and what I do.

I plan to write blogs like this once every fortnight (weekly if there is many things on to talk about). I haven’t really read through this at all and their could be a lot of mistakes and for that I will apologize. I hope you enjoyed the read, it was fun to write this up!

– Jordan “Zenabi” Fighera