VALORANT team shooting for the stars

to work with. That was how I basically got started, and then … when Marci got the job back in 2004, hired me as the assistant and just kinda stayed here ever since. … UTD itself presents so many good things that that’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed so long.”

However, even in spite of his long history with volleyball, the coaching shakeup has given rise to new responsibilities and problems, as Villarreal’s promotion represents the first ever coaching change in UTD volleyball history. Luckily, this changing dynamic hasn’t been too harsh on the newly appointed coach, as his longtime role as assistant has left him well prepared.

UTD’s new VALORANT team prepares to take the fight to LAN before the start of the official season.

VALORANT is a tactical team first person shooter released by Riot Games, who are mainly known for League of Legends. The game involves two teams of six fighting for control of territory with a combination of abilities and gunfights. Because of Riot’s previous support for collegiate leagues, UTD decided to support a full team for the game ahead of the start of the official collegiate VALORANT league, known as CVAL, in November. Before the start of CVAL, the team has participated in third party tournaments such as the weekly lengthy, with over 100 potential students. Candidates were whittled down by their rank and role, and then the top 20 players were given full tryout sessions. The team ended up with players with a wide range of experience, including rookie computer engineering freshman Andrew “WinDoge” Hill, computer science junior Justin Jung and long-time player and psychology senior Brian “BrianH” Honea. Honea currently plays the duelist role on the team, which focuses on killing other players to gain advantages. Honea said that one of the team’s strengths was their varied experience with the nascent VALORANT pro scene.

“We have a lot of good experience with some of our core members,” Honea said. “So it helps with team learning and team growing.

“It’s very hard to grind out rounds in college versus really good teams,” Linden said. "They can do so much crazy stuff that you aren’t necessarily prepared for. You can only do so much with a default [strategy] and trying your best to just play safe and get kills if they’re trying to do something crazy.” the university as one of the major reasons he got into volleyball in the first place.

Jung and ITS sophomore Saurav “Saurav” Chaudhary serve as the team's IGL players, meaning they make snap decisions needed to coordinate the team.

“I got started back at Angelo State, that’s where Coach Allison and I first met,” Villarreal said.“I got involved with volleyball … starting my freshman year in college. As a helper, I would just go in and toss balls and kinda just be around. That’s how I started to learn the game and see how practices ran and what drills to do and what position I wanted

“I was fortunate enough to have a lot of input and have a lot of responsibility as the assistant,” Villarreal said. “Being here as long as I was able to be here, I think the transition is more of the team getting used to the change in the role, getting used to me in that position, and figuring out things aren’t exactly the same. We had to change a few things and so I think that’s the difference of going from last year to this year … I think everybody’s still learning, we’re still in the learning phase, so that’s probably the biggest thing is getting used to each other in the new positions and still learning that things aren’t always gonna be the same.”

Alongside the role change, Villarreal said that it’d be important to establish a new

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