T.c: "We can still be competitive with three days of practice with someone like sdy"

Jeffrey "Mnmzzz" Moore spoke with Passion UA coach Tiaan "T.c" Coertzen after his side's loss to NAVI in the opening match at IEM Atlanta.

T.c provided comment on his team's performance v. NAVI, Passion UA's roster troubles in 2026, and how the recent addition of Viktor "sdy" Orudzhev.

Find the video interview below with a full transcription underneath. All questions and answers have been slightly edited for length and clarity.

I'm sure that first map is gonna sting a little, considering you had a good chance to take it against NAVI. Starting with Anubis, how do you feel the team did, and what led to them giving it up?

I think it was a really good CT side from us, but on the T side, there were too many rounds that we let slip. Too many clutch situations that we had that we could have played better. I think we made our lives hard for ourselves at the end of the day.

At the end of the day, we are coming here with very limited practice, another roster change this season. You can only do so much with the amount of time we had. Even though we had ten days between events, we had about three days of practice with sdy, so we're working with what we've got at the moment.

It's not a very deep strat book, obviously. I think that one definitely stings a little bit, and we should have closed it out. Plenty of things we can still fix and add, right?

One can't help but feel bad for the team because when we talked to JT and nicx and FRAG 20, they were so excited and there was this air of optimism, "We're done using FaNg at Rio, we going to FRAG and gonna get some good practice with Senzu, our five-man roster is finally all together," and immediately Senzu leaves for BC.Game.

How late before it happened did you know the news,was it something that was already in mind at FRAG or was it after FRAG that you learned he'd be going to BC.Game?

We found out the day before FRAG started. We arrived in Vegas on Thursday, and we found out it was happening on Friday, but the deal hadn't been confirmed. We were in this super weird situation of, "Is it happening, is it not happening, what's going on?"

Even though the news was there, it got confirmed on Sunday or Monday after FRAG. Then, we pretty much had to scramble and figure out flying to Europe, and who we're playing in the next tournament with.

He was a big source of firepower in this team, I think he maintained a 1.21 rating over three months with the squad this year. Does that put a dark cloud over the team, losing your star rifler after such a difficult season?

Even with him and the firepower that he brought, we had a lot of other issues that we were busy solving. Obviously, the communication was a big problem for us and we spent a lot of time working on it and trying to fix it. I think that if we were able to make these changes during the player break in December, and we came into the season with Senzu, it could have been completely different.

The way it happened and having limited practice going into every event, made things more difficult. Losing him, though, and the firepower, it's not the end of the world. We can still be competitive with three days of practice with someone like sdy.

It's freeing up the other guys to do more, not playing with Senzu. it's also improving the communication a lot. People are able to help each other a lot more. You're giving up the firepower but there's a lot of other positives, too.

With the midseason additions of Senzu and try, a lot of people speculated that there would be some culture and communication issues. Do you think management and the team underestimated how hard it would be to build a roster that was so diverse?

Not at all. I told them, going into the changes, that the main thing we're going to need is time, and please don't tell me two months after these signings that someone else is taking Senzu. That's exactly what happened. So, I can only do so much from my end. Obviously, I knew we were gonna need time. Unfortunately, that's the one thing we didn't get.

It's not that we underestimated the difficulties, but we saw a lot of upside with it and that we would be able to improve things. Even though we had the roster together for 70 days, we had about 20 days of practice with the actual team. With visa issues and playing tournaments with different rosters the whole time, it was a big headache. There wasn't any underestimation to it, we just needed more time.

You can see as the tournaments went on, how we progressed. The team was making decent progress and if we had enough time, we would have been able to solve a lot of issues.

It sounds like you're saying that, despite Senzu being plucked away from the team, you can still look back and say, "Hey, we were trending in the right direction." Can we continue that progress that was made earlier into this new Passion UA roster with sdy? Or are we completely starting over again?

Obviously, it's the core team of four. Sure, we have a lot of things that we are filling sdy in on. At the end of the day, a lot of the positions Senzu was playing were key positions. It's hard to plug [sdy] in, right? We've switched Kvem back to some of those positions.

It's not a complete rebuild. But, once again, we don't even know how long we are going to have sdy, at the moment, because it's another loan. We may be playing the next tournament with a different roster; you never know. We're just doing what we can with the situation in front of us.

Speaking of sdy, where did he come from and how did he find his way onto this Passion UA roster? What's your early appraisal of him as a player?

Like I said to you earlier, we found out pretty late that the Senzu transfer was confirmed. sdy had been someone we had been speaking to ever since the ENCE team got benched. Luckily, he was available, and he was able to come and play for us. It made sense.

Early opinion of him, he's a really smart and hardworking guy. He's got the skill to back it up, as well. He complements JT very well because he does a lot of the things that JT doesn't like to do. sdy is very good at keeping the energy up, and because he was IGLing, he plugs a lot of missing comms, and that's super helpful.

In that regard, it seems like he brings a lot of positives. Is he someone who you would like to keep?

We'll have to see what happens at this point. We're going with the flow and seeing what happens when the player break comes, and we have to make more final decisions about what's happening with the roster.

I don't know to what degree you're able to speak to this, but we have seen JamezIRL bumping around on social media. He was with the team in Rio and now here in Atlanta. He was brought in after leaving Wildcard. What's it like working with him again?

I've always enjoyed working with him. It was quite sad when his time on Complexity came to an end. But three months after, we were all let go. He's really nice, a super hardworking guy. I've never met someone who can do the amount of work that he does. He's a nice guy to be around. He really fits in well and helps a lot with the team culture.

We don't know if you'll be facing SINNERS or GamerLegion, but those are both teams that you're looking to beat and stay alive her in Atlanta. Do you think those teams are within grasp of you at the moment?

For sure, we stand a chance against whoever we play next. Both of them shoot really hard, and we've seen what they can do. SINNERS had a really good run right before the VRS cutoff, and they were really good at the tournaments they were playing at. GamerLegion, also, they play really well. It's gonna be a tough opponent, especially with the amount of practice that we have. We'll take it one game at a time and see how it goes.