Spotlight interview: OPTX’s Kat Hunter

Fans of the Championship Gaming Series (CGS) will know Kat Hunter as the general manager of the San Francisco Optx. These same aficionados may be less aware of her career outside of the CGS. Most notably she was a member of the all-female gaming squad, the Frag Dolls. She has also produced game related content for AT&T Blue Room and served as a webmaster for Game Daily. She became involved in the video game community after a career in advertising.

Kat Hunter spoke with GGL recently at the CGS players’ village in Los Angeles. She covered a variety of topics including her team’s status, the management process, and the state of professional gaming.

GGL: Describe what it’s like managing your team on a daily basis. What sort of schedules and routines do you put the players through or ask them to undergo?

Kat Hunter: Every day is something completely different. You have to take into account what happened the day before and the day before that and where your players are mentally, emotionally, and physically. As a general rule, I wake up around 10 AM and start working with the other general managers on setting up our practice schedule for the Counter-Strike players. We set up the practice schedules amongst ourselves for at least Counter-Strike and then watch them practice. We also go into the consult rooms and watch our Dead or Alive 4 (DOA4) players. Then we’re off to the matches at night. We usually get there about two hours before the matches start. We play and then come back and deal with the aftermath. We finish off our day with a team meeting at 11 pm.

GGL: Which North American franchise poses the greatest threat to the Optx in season 2?

KH: It’s funny because the most challenging franchise for us is not high in the standings right now. I know lost two matches to Dallas [recently]. But we shouldn’t have lost two matches to Dallas. We should have won at least one of those. However I think the most challenging franchise for us is Carolina. It always has been.

GGL: How many hours per week did your team practice during the off-season?

KH: Ironically they probably practice more than when they are here. They put in 6-8 hours days easily during the off-season. In the on-season they can get burned out after a solid six hours.

GGL: What games or areas did you feel your franchise needed to improve upon after season one?

KH: We needed to pick up points in Forza 2 and DOA4 male. Forza was easy for me because Besibol (Nolsen Perez) wasn’t able to come back. He decided to become a fireman, and I’m very proud of him. We definitely wanted Skittl3s (Erika Galegor) back on the team, but the transition from Project Gotham Racing 3 (PGR3) to Forza 2 is going to take her another year. She wasn’t quite as fast as the other racers. Give her another year and she will be back in the CGS.

GGL: How has your perspective of team management changed since last summer?

KH: Last summer I spent more time worrying about making sure that my team was practicing and there weren’t parties in their rooms at night. It was the first year and all the players were incredibly excited to be here. This year everyone’s serious and I can spend more of my energy on the things that actually matter. You can see that across the board with all the teams. You don’t have to worry about making sure your players are in bed at night or that they are up in the morning. They’re awake, they’re ready. All the CGS players this year are extremely self-motivated.

GGL: How have your experiences as a member of the Frag Dolls benefited you in the management process?

KH: With the Frag Dolls you had to consistently work with incredibly different personalities during stressful situations. You had seven very different women who were put together because a company said you had to be together. We had to make it work and win at the same time.

I don’t get discouraged as quickly as some people in the Counter-Strike community. They’re used to having such a wide variety of people to work with that they get picky. So when something doesn’t work and when one person doesn’t quite fit in, I take the approach of backing up and seeing what we can do to make it work rather than just giving up.

GGL: You could only retain half of your team members from season one. What factors weighed into your decision to keep certain team members and what qualities were you looking for in new players?

KH: I knew that PGR3 was going to be completely replaced. I wanted to support the Forza community seeing as it was a new game. There were several PGR3 racers that didn’t get picked up because they were not up to speed in Forza 2. I definitely wanted to embrace the Forza community because people like ComeBackDan (Dan Otto) are great to have in the league.

I knew that Vanessa (Vanessa Arteaga) is a huge benefit to our team and that DOA4 would be really important this year. When you have two strong DOA4 players together you have real point force. I wanted to make sure my DOA4 male talent was able to match up better with Vanessa this season. I did that and I think NinjaCW (Chris Harris) is an amazing player. I am very lucky to have him.

Outside of that we had Counter-Strike. It’s not a secret that switching two players from last year has not gelled as quickly as I had hoped. Our current record is not what I want it to be. We definitely had a lot of problems last year with our team in terms of internal fighting. My desire was to make our team more professional as opposed to what 2007 had been like. It’s just taking more time for the five of them to gel together.

GGL: Many people have been talking about Stermy’s (Alessandro Avallone) improved performance in FIFA 08 over last season. What qualities did you see in him that led you to retain him for the second season? What do you accredit for his improved performance?

KH: Stermy is an absolute dream to have on your team. He understands what it is to be a professional athlete and he relates to the other players on a real level. I’ve never hear him put anyone down on our team. He’s always buiding people up. He notices when someone is down and discouraged and he sees what he can do to help them out and give them advice. He’s also been through the ringer competitively. There is no one at the CGS who has the amount of competitive experience in the span of time that Alessandro has been playing. The team has really come to lean on him. He’s that nice guy that everyone wants to be around.

He’ll sit in front of his computer for eight hours and just practice one shot. He would get up, eat, and then sit back down and practice that same shot over and over again. When he played Quake he would run around the maps for hours without shooting because he wanted to learn how to run faster from point A to point B. How many gamers do you know that really take a game, break it down into each of its elements, master them all, and then build it back up again? He does that. Besides the fact that he is a role model to my team, he is 100% dedicated to his game. You can’t ask for anything more.

GGL: Has there been a big transition for him from the first season’s FIFA 07 to FIFA 08?

KH: Yes, FIFA 08 is a lot harder than FIFA 07. We have the goalies set to World Class this year which means scoring a goal in general is much harder. Then you have the fact that all the game play is largely manual whereas a lot of it was automatic in FIFA 07. It makes the game a lot harder, but that is better for Stermy. That is more suited to his skill set.

GGL: In the past you’ve involved Optx in charity work. What is your motivation for this? What non-CGS activities do you have planned this year?

KH: We didn’t do as much as we wanted in year one because to do events you have to fly players to the location. We didn’t have the operational budget for that, which was really disappointing for me. Last year we were involved in Penny Arcade’s childhood charity. We are talking right now to one of our sponsors who is a high school music teacher. We are hoping to do some in-school motivational work where we show students the beneficial side of gaming and tie all that into the inner city projects in San Francisco. That looks like its actually going to happen because we’ll be able to get them in town.

GGL: You’ve produced content for AT&T Blue Room in the past and have a history of creative work in advertising. If you weren’t involved in gaming, what would you be doing instead?

KH: I would probably go back to working at an advertising agency. I left the ad agency I worked for because I wasn’t passionate about it. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it. It’s been my career, and I’ve done it over and over again. I just wasn’t passionate about it. If I wasn’t in gaming, that’s where I’d be.

If I weren’t involved with the CGS and pro-gaming or E-Sports then I would probably start a video production company catering to lifestyle and small game sites that don’t have the resources to create game content.

GGL: You said in 2007 that we would look back ten years from now and see CGS as an important historical event in professional gaming. What effect has the CGS had on professional gaming to date?

KH: If professional gaming is going to make it, it will be because of what is happening here at the CGS. That is because the right people are behind, it, the right gamers are involved in it, there is actual funding, and we have television venues like G4 and DirecTV to put our content out there. We also have the right E-Sports sites like GGL and GotFrag. We’ve got people who have decided to take something that everyone said would never be entertaining and make it entertaining. I don’t know what else there needs to be in order for pro-gaming to work.

GGL: What advice would you give to a player who wanted to try out for the CGS?

KH: If someone wants to be a professional gamer I would start by asking them to really think about what that means. It doesn’t mean you want to play games and make money. These guys are athletes. They are incredibly smart and incredibly dedicated. It took them a long time with a lot of failures to get here. So if you want to be a professional gamer you need to stop and think if you are willing to give everything up and put in those eight hour days by spending time on a game that you would normally grow sick of playing.

If it’s a team-based sport, then put everything into your team and learn what it is that makes a team grow. If it’s an individual sport, ask yourself if you are willing to get a side job to make money and fly everywhere it takes to get noticed. People are not going to come to you. You’ll have to make it happen yourself. Getting started in gaming is hard and it costs a lot of money. You don’t have to be rich but you do need a job. If you are willing to give it everything then my advice would be to find online communities and play your heart out. If it’s a team-based sport then enter every single competition you can find. You need to be active in the community of which you want to be a part. If its CGS, then you should be active in the CGS community. By the time you get to the CGS Combine I should already know who you are.