ScrunK: "Hopefully in a few months you will see a different side of BIG"

"Individual people are not stepping up when they need to," the BIG coach said.

It has been a rough start to the season for BIG, who crashed out of FISSURE Playground 1 in 9th-12th place and went out last in IEM Cologne's Stage 1 following losses to FaZe and paiN.

Robin "⁠ScrunK⁠" Röpke, who took charge of the team at the start of the month, lamented that his team picked up only one map in Cologne despite having the best pistol round percentage in Stage 1. "I think we can just blame ourselves, we didn't step up when we needed it," he told HLTV after the match.

The German coach said that it will take time for the players to get used to his system, adding that the team's preparations for the first events were disrupted by Marcel "⁠hyped⁠" Köhn's surgery, which forced him to play for the team at the EEF European Esports Championship.

"I'm a pretty optimistic guy, so I'd say hopefully in a few months you will see a different side of BIG when we get to work with every individual in this team," he said.

"I see them in practice and what everybody is capable of, you saw glimpses here and there at this event as well, and I'm excited to really get to work with the guys."

If you can't see the embed above, you can listen to the audio recording on HLTV's interview channel on Spotify.

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Commiserations. Of course, I'm sure it's not the result you were looking for, especially this being your home event. A really tough loss and close loss to end it on. Tell me your thoughts at the moment.

Obviously it sucks, we're all frustrated, but let's be real, we won like almost every pistol the whole event and we didn't convert many maps. I think we can just blame ourselves, we didn't step up when we needed it. We won nine out of ten pistols. Then you should win more maps than we did.

We tried really hard, we gave it our all, and the guys, everybody showed passion and good energy. But in the end, today the problem was the skill.

Tell me about the start of the season. You're coming over from FISSURE, where you also had a couple of close results, and another one here against paiN. What have you identified as the biggest issues you're facing at the beginning of the season?

The start of the season was kind of rough for us because we couldn't really practice with hyped, since he had surgery and had a little break. FISSURE, they practiced with me AWPing and we tried to implement what we could, but it was hard for him to transition into it. Also with me, I come from a different approach, I try to bring in a lot of new ideas, less structure, so to say; less German CS is the way to say it, and this will take time.

In the system that I want to play, the individuals need to step up, and that will take time because right now you can see that it's clearly the problem that we're having, that individual people are not stepping up when they need to. That kind of explains our results in FISSURE. We were super nervous, which we shouldn't have been; we could have just closed it out versus Complexity and we would have been in playoffs, already a success, but the nerves got to us and we just lost it on our own. This event as well, versus FaZe we just got outclassed, and today it was also the individual skill that sometimes lacked.

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Do you feel like that's creating a clash? We know tabseN to be this super-structured in-game leader, so does that make this transitional period hard to make sure your system can be implemented?

To be honest, there's no clash with tabseN at all. He's really open-minded when it comes to new energy, new ideas and everything. He sees my vision and he appreciates it. They still have some structure from before, so we try to mesh the things, but he's super open to it.

I would say it's not him that is dictating that we have to play super structured. If you play open, he also gets to play more as well, it frees him up as well, so he sees the benefit of it. It's just that this kind of style is hard to master, so it's going to take time to implement, and that's why it's hard to get these insta results.

What is it going to look like moving forward? How will you make sure this can work over time? Does it just take more practice, a change of mindset, or what is missing for the team to be able to adopt this new path?

I think it's just uniting ourselves under one vision, understanding how we want to approach it, what to do in certain situations, what your options when you play are, what you need to communicate, for example, or which peek you can do, what pressure utility you need to throw.

Giving the players a lot of tools to work with, and in the end, in my world, they should choose on their own which tools they want to use, but it has to make sense, and tabseN has to put the picture together. That's how I kinda want to approach it. Of course, there's going to be structure to ease it up, because you cannot just free-flow FACEIT everything, but the idea of it is giving the players more opportunities and more freedom to actually play.

This is going to take time and a lot of individual work. I haven't had much time with them, I started in July and hyped had surgery, and then we went event to event, so there hasn't been much practice. I'm a pretty optimistic guy, so I'd say hopefully in a few months you will see a different side of BIG when we get to work with every individual in this team. I see them in practice and what everybody is capable of, you saw glimpses here and there at this event as well, and I'm excited to really get to work with the guys.

How has it been for you to transition into this role, coming over from being an in-game leader and going back to Germany? Has it been a natural transition for you?

It felt pretty natural. In my past teams like Sangal and Fire Flux, it was kind of a one-man show when it comes to coaching, playing, analyzing, I've been doing it all kind of by myself. Not blaming anybody, the coaches I had did their part, but when it comes to the in-game stuff I taught the players, I worked with them individually.

It's kind of the same role now, I just don't need to play deathmatch or FACEIT as much (laughs). I can just focus solely on that, and if I'm honest with myself, that's also my biggest strength. Mechanically, I was never that gifted, it was always my mind for the game, and now I can fully open up to that, fully use that tool that I have to my advantage. I feel like I'm really ready to take on this challenge, and as a coach I think I can reach heights I never reached as a player.