London Spitfire academy side British Hurricane revealed their new roster a few weeks back, and now the team have opened up in a Reddit AMA.
One of their notable players is Seb “numlocked’ Barton, a tank player who most recently was with Los Angeles Valiant in the Overwatch League.
Prior to that, the 26-year-old has played both Team Fortress 2 and League of Legends competitively (we interviewed numlocked during the LoL 4Nations in 2014), giving him a lot of experience compared to many other players.
But what was it like going from Valiant to Hurricane, and dropping down from the Overwatch League to the lower-tier Contenders?
Reddit user okidli1 asked this on the Hurricane AMA yesterday, and numlocked responded: “I was really happy to make it to into a Contenders team. I honestly thought my career was over after Valiant, I didn’t think anyone would be interested in an older player who hadn’t scrimmed for the year.
“I’m much happier now. I actually feel ‘at home’ on the team and love being back in the flow of things with scrimming and regular vod review. I’m in a much better place now than I was half a year ago.”
“I honestly thought my career was over after Valiant, I didn’t think anyone would be interested in an older player who hadn’t scrimmed for the year.”
On his time with Valiant, numlocked said: “I was motivated for the first half of the season. It was apparent early on I wouldn’t be given an opportunity to scrim, but I didn’t let that deter me. I stayed motivated and constantly trying to show my commitment to getting a chance by showing up constantly, watching every scrim, being early etc.
“After half a season of doing this it was hard to care when the situation hadn’t changed at all and they weren’t trying to fix the problem.”
Hurricane revealed their new roster a couple of weeks ago.
It consists of numlocked as Main Tank, Hafþór ‘Hafficool’ Hákonarson as Flex Tank, Daniel ‘Dannedd’ Rosdahl as Flex DPS, Joni ‘Jofi’ Ilves as Main Support and Jakob ‘bock1’ Kleveland as Flex Support.
Samir ‘Tsuna’ Ikram and William ‘SparkR’ Andersson joined as Hitscan DPS, with the latter a development player.
Ysabel ‘Noukky’ Müller is team manager and Joshua ‘Elbion’ Tuffs is coach.
You can follow Hurricane and the team on Twitter here:
Staying true to our tradition of developing players, the time has come to introduce the 2019 British Hurricane! #FangsOut?️
? Read more: https://t.co/16Yjvz9mke
? @Danneddow
? @Tsuna_ow
? @SparkR_OW
?️ @numlocked
?️ @Hafficool
? @Jofi_ow
? @bock1 pic.twitter.com/BU3YSdS03R— British Hurricane (@Hurricane) February 23, 2019
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Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
