Coach Pitches Tahm Kench Switch the Day Before Match in Tachibana Hinano’s Scrim Stream

VSPO — The coach of Tachibana Hinano’s League of Legends team floated a late change to the lineup during a scrim, or practice match, stream on Sunday: swapping the Rakan support pick for Tahm Kench the day before the team’s next match. The idea came up in a feedback session after the third scrim game of the stream, a 51-minute game the team did not win, and the group was split over it.

The coach argued that Tahm Kench could stand where Rakan stands while being sturdier, with a slow and a shield, so the team’s Jinx could stand further forward and poke more freely. Two other coaches said they were uneasy about changing the lineup on the eve of a match, and one participant worried about taking attention from the player who makes many of the team’s calls. “If we lose, you can blame it all on me,” the coach said.

“If we lose, you can blame it all on me.” — The coach, during the debate over the proposal

After nearly half an hour of discussion, the coach said the idea would be dropped if it looked doubtful, and the group agreed to try it. The test ran about an hour in a custom game, with the team resetting teamfights from set game states of roughly 20 to 40 minutes. Participants said the pick made it easier to poke from the front, though one noted the team would still struggle to start fights. The coach said that, if the pick were used, the team should not initiate unless it had a numbers advantage or control of the top lane. Whether it will be played in the match was not stated on stream.

Earlier reviews had focused on when to take objectives. The coach set a rule that the team touch Baron only when a control ward was in front of Baron and a ward sat in the middle of mid lane, and the team adopted ‘magic circle’ as a short call for finishing that vision setup first.

Chat logged 6,096 messages, with reactions to the pitch including “Coach, are you okay???” Of the 11 paid messages, the ones sampled mostly arrived after practice ended and cheered on the next day’s match. The schedule for that day was one practice game at 5 p.m. followed by the 8 p.m. match. Signing off, Tachibana said, “Well, it’ll work out somehow. I don’t know, though.”