Image via Ubisoft/@kirill_vision
After a wildly successful year with Soniqs, Joe “JoBro” Reyes has a promotion.
He’ll be running all of Soniqs’ data science as their head analyst, helping to provide solutions across Soniqs’ portfolio of teams, not just Rainbow Six Siege.
With that move, Lauren “Goddess” Williams will step in as the head coach of the team.
Both say that not much is going to change with the team itself – Seth “supr” Hoffman will still play a key role in determining strategy and will still effectively be a player/coach.
“This is my first time getting to have the head coach role,” Goddess said in a pre-announcement interview with SiegeGG. “I think I’m gonna take a couple weeks to figure out, I guess, what works best for me and the team.”
JoBro’s role was less hands-on, and he and Goddess describe it as a “mediator” role. Goddess says she wants to be more hands-on, but doesn’t know what form that will take at this point in time.
When asked why she made this move now, Goddess is candid: “I wanted to try it and see if I liked it. I hope it’s something I get to stick around and do more. But if it’s something I don’t like, I don’t feel like it would be hard to go back to what I was doing before.”
Goddess’s hard commitment is to Soniqs as an organization, not necessarily the coaching role.
JoBro has the same commitment but will be acting in a different manner. He leaves the day-to-day role with the Rainbow Six Siege team and will be using his expertise across Soniqs’ other teams – VALORANT, PUBG, and Rocket League. He’s moving to Philadelphia.
“I will specifically be focusing on our rosters that we have already on Soniqs and any teams that we might be adding in the future,” JoBro said.
Most teams that want to remain competitive are utilizing data to inform their strategies in some form. Statistics cannot paint a complete picture of a round, player, or strategy, but they can be instrumental in determining the correct path forward.
As an example, JoBro cites sQ’s matchup against Team Empire at SI. Utilizing their data and experience, Soniqs identified Hibana as an important part of Empire’s push, and wanted to force them onto Thatcher and Ace, and run Aruni, JoBro says. It forced dan onto Thatcher and ShepparD onto Ace, and would pair them up whereas normally dan would just swing on everyone with Finka. Soniqs lost the series 2-1, but peeled Coastline off Empire by a 8-6 scoreline.
He’s hoping that all the Soniqs teams will benefit from this data accumulation as well.
As for Soniqs, the team, not much will change. A familiar face departs, and another familiar one takes its place. Currently, the plan seems to be to not change a proven formula. However, that’ll depend on how the next year unfolds.