Mental and performance coaching in esports is still nowhere near as commonplace as in traditional sports, where teams have a multitude of resources for their players and responsibilities are divided even further, from nutritionists to strength and conditioning coaches, physiotherapists, and more.
It is, however, no longer a new phenomenon in this industry, popularized by Astralis during their era and since adopted by many top, trophy-contending organizations to help mitigate performance stressors and establish structures that can consistently lead to titles.
But once that structure is established and a team is on an era-defining run, how does a performance manager adapt, and what work goes into keeping a team focused when it has won everything and seems unbeatable?
That is the question I posed to Jack Birtwhistle, Vitality's Performance Manager, in an over-hour-long interview as the team looks to get back to its winning ways at Esports World Cup after a quarter-final exit at the Cologne Major and an early elimination from the online stage of BLAST Bounty Season 2.
The Australian had a five-year background in professional rugby but almost no esports experience when he arrived at the French organization in November 2023, after it won the BLAST.tv Paris Major and just before it ended the year with title wins at BLAST Fall and World Final.
But things soon went awry, or as Birtwhistle puts it, "We probably got ahead of our skis a little and put the outcome before the process." Vitality still consistently made the playoffs of events and even won IEM Cologne, but the team couldn't reconcile differences in vision between itself and Lotan "Spinx" Giladi.
"Once you get to a point where the player doesn't want to be in the team anymore, I see my role in the mental performance space as… I like to use the term 'sherpa': I can show you the path up the hill and try to carry some of your stuff for you, but I can't take the steps for you," Birtwhistle says when asked about his work trying to mitigate issues during that period.
"So once Lotan [Spinx] had made that decision that this team was no longer for him, there's nothing I could really do to get him back on board; we needed to try to patch it up over the time we were there. Honestly, I don't know how we could have done things differently over that period, because it's hard to explain, but it's not a hostile situation exactly. We want to try to keep as much harmony as possible, but if we then dive deeper into the issues, we risk creating an unsafe environment for people. Well, unsafe is probably too strong a word, but it becomes untenable for people to be together.
"So everyone was working hard, including Lotan, to try to keep the patches and the duct tape on the team over that time. But honestly, by the time we got midway through the second half of the year, I think everybody knew the change was coming, and that also gave people a bit of peace, that 'Okay, there's going to be an adjustment and everyone will be better off for it.'"
That all changed when Robin "ropz" Kool joined in January 2025, a move that spurred on the most dominant season in Counter-Strike as Vitality went on a 30-match winstreak and won seven events in a row, including the BLAST.tv Austin Major.
Birtwhistle emphasizes that 99% of the success comes from the players, and he is there to make the 1% difference that can help bring out the best version of themselves. It was during that run that he implemented "theming," a concept he borrowed from his time in rugby.
"Basically, it's a theme that becomes sort of defining for your season," he says. "And we used the Tom Brady documentary, 'The Man in the Arena.' We wanted to become the men in the arena.
"It's funny to even think this going back then, because prior to 2025, there was a slight trend where we were struggling in the playoffs a bit. Like we'd dominate the group stage, be really good, and then get to the playoffs and struggle. And so we wanted to become the men in the arena, and there's a great quote there. I won't get it exactly right, but 'The Man in the Arena' quote is that the critics and the commenters will always have something to say, but they've never felt what it's like to be inside the arena, and you should never take criticism or judgment from people who don't know what that experience is like."
Asked to explain the documentary and what becoming a "Man in the Arena" meant to the team, he continued: "One of the reasons I picked it is because everyone looks at them and says they're the greatest team of all time, one of the greatest sporting dynasties ever in any sport. But they had years where they got to the playoffs and lost, years where he was injured and they didn't get to the playoffs. I can't remember the exact dates, maybe 2001 or 2002 for the first one, and he won his last one with the Patriots in maybe 2018. No one judges them by their failures in the end, they judge them by the amount of times they succeeded.
"Part of the reason I picked it is because CS is like that too: you can take all those seasons and put them into one CS season, because you're going to win some trophies and you're going to lose some trophies. So I didn't want us defining success by winning everything we did. In one of the first episodes, Tom Brady talks a lot about process, and one of his quotes is, 'My goal is to be a Super Bowl champion on the first Monday of pre-season.' Anyone can be a Super Bowl champion in Super Bowl week, they put in all the hours, they're dedicated, they're motivated, they're doing all the work. Can you turn up with the same level of discipline and dedication on the first Monday of pre-season that you would on the Monday before the Super Bowl starts?"
It was that, combined with "periodization" — when the team wanted to peak — that Vitality used to define its season, and Birtwhistle goes on to explain how that was broken down at each event the team attended, including the "poetic" Intel Grand Slam win in Rod Laver Arena, where the Australian Open in tennis is played and Vitality felt it was "destiny" to win the gold bars in the same arena that Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic won Grand Slams.
Another concept Birtwhistle introduced was a simple Google form with a traffic light system, stating he likes to "keep it simple" as detailed feedback can be challenging for young men and gamers.
"Periodically we'll check in on our values, I'll send the boys a form to fill in where they can give a score on how we think we're doing in all the different categories," he says. "We might use a traffic light system: green, yellow, red. If anything's red, it needs to be addressed straight away, if anything's yellow, we need to give it some attention, if it's green, let it keep going. But we're constantly trying to come back to those, and we keep that conversation open.
"We can ask the players to rate how they feel about the different sides of different maps, just to get a snapshot of everyone's feelings leading into a big tournament, or the beginning of a season, mid-season, before the Major, and we'll do these check-ins.
"It's flexible in a sense: we've had values dinners where we'll sit down as a team and just have a discussion over a meal. Sometimes it's a bit more structured, where if something has come up as an obvious issue, we might have a more structured conversation like, 'Okay, guys, we're struggling with our adaptability,' or 'we're struggling with being team first at the moment.'"
All of that work paid off and culminated in a trophy lift at the Austin Major, but it wasn't the same Vitality that returned to the server after the break. A loss to MOUZ in the semi-finals of IEM Cologne spelled the end of a 37-series winstreak to kick off the season, and another to The MongolZ at Esports World Cup showed that the chemistry from the first half of the year just wasn't quite there.
"I'll be honest, for me, my biggest challenge during that time was we didn't have enough humility as a team," Birtwhistle says. "When our standard basically became perfection, we were on what, a 37-map streak, and then we won every event, our expectation was that we are perfect at CS, we don't lose a map, we very rarely lose maps, we don't lose best-of-threes.
"And all of a sudden this is happening, and now frustration's growing from everybody, and we were really struggling to handle that humility, to be a bit more humble about where we are right now, a team that's not invincible. We were invincible, but now we're not, so how are we going to approach that? But it was very difficult to actually... something I say, I can work with the best goal kicker in the world in rugby, I can't kick the ball over the goalpost for them, they have to actually do the kick. So there's no amount of mental performance that can outdo poor individual skills, that can outdo a poor... not that we had a poor game plan, but we were trying to resolve this on all fronts, and it became really difficult because Dan [apEX] and Rémy [XTQZZZ] needed that time, and MaT needed that time, to go deep into the game."
Vitality got the time they needed ahead of a title-winning campaign at ESL Pro League Season 22, but were stopped short of more trophies as FURIA captured lightning in a bottle with several titles of their own. But that didn't shake Vitality heading into the StarLadder Budapest Major, where Birtwhistle says the team was "equally confident" as they had been in Austin, and that was on full display as they romped their way to victory and became back-to-back Major champions.
And somehow, after an unprecedented first half of 2025, they nearly did it all over again in 2026. Five titles in a row, including another Intel Grand Slam win at IEM Rio and a trophy at BLAST Rivals Season 1 immediately afterward despite the players not practicing, made the team look untouchable. But that extended practice break came back to haunt them as they lost to NAVI at IEM Atlanta to end their title streak, and their attempt to replicate their Budapest Major recovery at the Cologne Major went awry.
"There was a consensus that we weren't at our best form individually leading into the Major, and we probably missed an opportunity to push harder on our 'do your job' value: we'd given this time off, but we actually expect it back," Birtwhistle says.
"It doesn't mean when we return from a break we're back to business as usual, because we had time off after Dallas, time off after Atlanta, and then a practice block into a bootcamp, and we probably should have been more explicit with the players on our expectation around the trade-off, that you have that time off, but 'do your job' means when we come back to practice you need to know all your stuff, you need to be at least ready to get into your best individual form.
"It's not that the players didn't work hard, they absolutely did, but from a staff point of view, that's something we could have been clearer on and probably didn't pick up on. We definitely trust the players to find their way to their best form, and they had a good program, XTQZZZ and MaT made a good program. So it's more about being really, really clear and stating it: if we need to do more, we need to do more. We didn't push the players a little harder on that, but that doesn't mean we would have won the Major if we had."
A BLAST Bounty title win continued to elude Vitality at the start of the season, although this time, they missed the LAN finals entirely after getting bounced in the online group stage. Birtwhistle says the staff took time during the break to reflect on its approach and whether they put too much trust in the same system that led to so much success, and though they aren't falling into the fallacious temptation to throw everything out, they are testing out a new structure ahead of the Esports World Cup.
"Something that I took from rugby was what they used to call, 'How do you manage the gray?' If you look at your Google Calendar, all your prac, theory, coach meetings, everything is colorful in your calendar, but the gray is the time when there's nothing structured," Birtwhistle says about their new plan.
"So how do you, as an individual, as a player, manage that time? What are you doing before practice? What are you doing after practice? As I said before, we give the players a lot of freedom. We've put more in the calendar this time, and we've said, 'We're going to hold you guys more accountable.' If we say that 'do your job' is one of our values, we're going to hold you accountable to that. And not only are we going to hold you accountable, we're going to put time in the calendar where we see you do the work, rather than just expecting you guys to do it. They responded really well to it yesterday. We'll see tonight when we reconvene if we've got the same energy, but I don't want to share Rémy and MaT's secret sauce too much.
"But that's the big change, and I'm sure every coach and every team knows this: it's how much time do you structure, put in as committed time to the team, and how much do you let go? [...] The coaches have always coached the players and the players have always done the work, right? It's not about [doubting] the work, but this brings better connection because we're doing it together, better alignment because we're understanding exactly what each other's doing, and more sharing of questions and time spent together on the server."
You can watch the complete interview here, where Birtwhistle goes in-depth about players' routines, his "informal" approach, and the way he implements his structure to help teams perform.
FURIA
Gabriel 'FalleN' Toledo
Yuri 'yuurih' Santos
Mareks 'YEKINDAR' Gaļinskis
Kaike 'KSCERATO' Cerato
Danil 'molodoy' Golubenko
Sid 'sidde' Macedo
Vitality
Dan 'apEX' Madesclaire
Robin 'ropz' Kool
Mathieu 'ZywOo' Herbaut
Shahar 'flameZ' Shushan
William 'mezii' Merriman
Rémy 'XTQZZZ' Quoniam
Astralis
Nicolai 'device' Reedtz
Peter 'dupreeh' Rasmussen
Andreas 'Xyp9x' Højsleth
Lukas 'gla1ve' Rossander
Emil 'Magisk' Reif
MOUZ
Lotan 'Spinx' Giladi
Ádám 'torzsi' Torzsás
Dorian 'xertioN' Berman
Oldřich 'PR' Nový
Adrian 'xelex' Vincze
Dennis 'sycrone' Nielsen
The MongolZ
Garidmagnai 'bLitz' Byambasuren
Sodbayar 'Techno' Munkhbold
Usukhbayar '910' Banzragch
Zolbayar 'tikuak' Chimedtseren
Dugarsuren 'DarkMeister' Ireedui
Erdenedalai 'maaRaa' Bayanbat
Robin 'ropz' Kool
Lotan 'Spinx' Giladi