One upon a time, the idea of coaches for esports teams, especially Counter-Strike, was a fairly hot topic. It was a debate that once burned bright: is there a place for ‘the coach’ in professional gaming? But the incident that brought it to the forefront of people’s minds was also the one that removed it again.

Back in 2005, Chris ‘Bootman’ Boutté was a well known GotForums writer who specialised in tactical articles and round-by-round analyses. What this led to was him eventually joining Team-3D as Counter-Strike’s first ever official “coach.” Forum posters (and indeed a few insiders) questioned the decision. What could someone who’d never even played in CAL-I teach former CPL world champions about CS?

From the outside looking in, the answer to that question was a fairly resounding “not much.” Never the less, I personally viewed it as an interesting experiment – if a somewhat short one. Rumours abounded at the time that Bootman’s personality clashed with other members of the team; that 3D players didn’t want to take the game so seriously and resented the idea of being taught to play. Whatever the ins-and-outs of the situation, the coach experiment ended fairly abruptly and Bootman was back to writing “CS for Dummies.”

As far as I’m aware, that was the first and last time that coaching was ever given a serious try – at least in CS. SK’s Halo 3 team, however, does have a coach. A lot of what he does at LAN would probably be illegal in CS, but a different subject. Other than practically ghosting for his team, Georg 'x2Sneeka' Siewert helps to gee his team up and get them ‘psyched’. He also has managerial duties like arranging the team’s flights and accommodation. In fact, Sneeka seems more like a football-like manager figure than anything else.

One thing I learned about Halo at i36 is that it’s about 95% head games and abuse with 5% being actually outplaying your opponents. The ability to screw with your opponents heads is an important one in such an undeveloped scene. From that description, Sneeka’s job sounds like a more familiar figure to Counter-Strike fans: Jason Lake.

So it begs the question, then: what exactly is the roll of a coach and is he useful in modern CS? To my mind, a coach is someone who picks a team and/or lays out the tactics for them. The player-picking is a hazy point, since that is more often done by management, but it does apply to WC3 teams if not CS. The days when CS teams had more than five players on their roster are seemingly dead and buried so picking a team on a per-game basis is moot.

Deciding tactics and play-style, however, is an all together more realistic option. Someone has to do it. But like the 3D/Bootman scenario, you struggle to imagine top class CS players accepting instructions from a semi-professional. In that situation, the usefulness of a coach will probably never be properly explored.

It is difficult to imagine a place for the coach in any esports game really, with the possible exception of WoW. CS players wouldn’t accept it and possibly don’t need it – how many new strategies can really be left to discover in a 10 year old game? In Warcraft or Starcraft another tactician is even less useful. The game is primarily played in a 1on1 format and since the top players all know one another there is no scope for an outsider to really offer something new.

The only way I can see a genuine coach being useful in esports is when more pros start to retire. Just like in football, players often make the best coaches and successful ones already have the respect of their peers, where someone like Bootman had to earn it and was never given the chance. An ex-pro can see all the same things as his players with the added bonus of being uninvolved, calm and calculating.

Alas, for most professional gamers retirement genuinely means retirement. A few come back to management or PR but mostly they hang up their mouse and do something else. Only Carlos 'KIKOOOO' Segal made a coaching comeback that I know of but he actually got to pick the team captain. Exactly how much of that was authentic is something we’ll never know but in my experience an esports captain is more cosmetic than anything else.

So while esports may continue to have so-called coaches, the chances are that they aren’t really coaches in the strictest sense of the word. Some are more useful that others, of course, but none of them are likely to be the genuine article. It may seem a little pedantic – maybe it is – but convincing pro-gamers to stick around might chance the face of esports for the better.

The world's first weekly esports column, The Zechs Files, returns next Tuesday.