1st - Ting - The Prince that was promised
Back in 2020, Southampton was a University that was pretty mediocre at CS. It didn't compare to the likes of Bath, Derby, Swansea and UWE and didnt have particularly any top level, committed players. Along comes Samuel “Ting” , he got scouted by Andy as a lowly level 9 nobody but this nobody would have incredible accomplishments both in and out of the server (also kick Andy off of his own team). Out of the server Ting would go on to have an engaged role in the SVGE committee, originally becoming what most consider to be the best CSGO Rep, later then becoming the society Vice President, Acting President and now the President. He has orchestrated one of the best society-run LAN’s , a key part for charity streams and unlike most rep’s ; actually ran 10mans.
As a player Ting has been in more finals than I can count, won two LAN finals, broke the NSE tournaments site to this day and the odd top performance in Wingman. Since joining, Ting has helped elevate Southampton to one of the best Universities for CS, being a major influence to the top team, the CS community and the society as a whole. In many ways, he was what Southampton was waiting for and what many other Uni’s hope for. At the start of the season I would never have expected him to be on this list, but it is well deserved.
Seeing as every podbots player features in this list for those who have kept up you will have seen that podbots had a shaky season prior and weren’t viewed as a top challenger for this season. This was after the transition of the IGL role from Frosty to Ting , where in his debut it was one of the most shocking, silent IGL performances that instilled little hope in their success. However, this was Ting’s first time IGLing and after a couple weeks of getting into it he was able to hit the ground running. He found this new role challenging as he hadnt really considered how active you had to be in managing the team. However, he managed to juggle this while continuing his typical stellar performances, finishing with a 1.21 rating which is very strong for an IGL.
Ting had played a role in the removal of two Team 4 fan favourites, bringing in Kai as one of the replacements. He thinks that Kai “is a great prospect as he's gained so much experience and started uni off at level 4. He's now around 2.3k which is an insane improvement. He's dedicated to getting better and watches demos of pros and reviews his own, so kudos to him. When we were looking for players for this uni year, I vouched for him heavily as even though he didn't have as high elo as other people I could see that he had a lot more potential in the future.” Ting’s support was well deserved and Ting has managed to mould a very strong team since.
Podbots would go on to have a David vs Goliath story, managing to best the seemingly invincible KCL Lions on LAN , with Ting thinking they “did pretty well”. Ting somewhat ghosted in the LAN Finals, but the best IGL’s extract the most potential from their players and the rest of podbots excelled in this series, managing to do the unthinkable and beat them 2-1.
Ting has had a very long story of failures and triumphs, with pieces of it distributed across all the other Southampton articles. He has been influential in both helping Southampton Players and the improvement of the whole of SVGE at a society level. Ting has helped resurrect what was a failing team and for 250+ games has remained committed and been a top player. Since the end of last season podbots have imploded and Ting constantly flirts with the idea of quitting University CS. Ting is probably the only person in University CS who could contend with 1crit in terms of impact and accomplishments in the scene, even if he does quit he will be long remembered.
Potentially the end of one of the great duos in Ting and Frosty, but its been fun to watch.
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