Photo by Riot Games
From rewatching old losses for fun to reassessing players he once went up against, yoman’s transition from Valorant pro to coach has come with a few surprises, including a Yoru revelation that has reshaped how Nongshim RedForce may end its 2026 season. Ult Orb spoke with yoman following Nongshim’s 2-0 win over Paper Rex to start the Stage 2 playoffs.
yoman says that while he’s working more hours as a coach, the weight of that work has been less intense, and that the work has made him revisit his own playing days.
“I keep thinking that when I was a player, my coaches must have looked at me like this, too,” he said. “It has been fun watching the players from a third-person perspective.”
Sometimes, yoman spends his nights doing something he once dreaded: rewatching his own worst matches. Not to relive the glory days, but to study his losses. As a coach, he says, it’s oddly enjoyable now.
It’s a new perspective for someone who spent years on the other side of the screen. yoman joined Nongshim RedForce’s coaching staff this past offseason, his first role off the server after competing since 2022 for teams like Gwangju Shadow, Rare Atom, the original Nongshim RedForce, and, most recently, Gen.G and Global Esports in VCT Pacific last year.
“It’s a bit of a TMI, but lately I’ve been rewatching videos from when I was a player, videos from hard times,” he said. “Videos of when I played poorly, got eliminated from Ascension, those kinds of videos. As a coach now, it’s fun looking back at those matches since becoming a coach.”
yoman and the Nongshim coaching staff as a whole have been hard at work since a trophy-lifting run at Masters Santiago. After running the field with a trademark Yoru-Neon comp, nerfs to both agents saw the team experiment in Stage 1 and Stage 2.
Double-Initiator looks with Breach and different players on the secondary Duelist roles have been tried, but have produced mixed results. Now, Nongshim has returned to Francis and Dambi’s Yoru and Neon, which has been central in a streak of three straight 2-0 wins.
“After Yoru got nerfed, I think we honestly weren’t able to objectively assess Francis’s impact with Yoru properly,” he said. “So at the time, we thought we had figured out what our team would be lacking once Yoru was out, but seeing Francis on Yoru again recently made us think, ‘Ah, did we misjudge that?’”
yoman says that while the team had a dip in form during that period without Francis’s Yoru, there were some positive takeaways, such as refining Dambi’s Operator or working with Xross and Rb on the secondary Duelist role. Still, though, he says Francis’s Yoru is one above all.
“But if we were to set Santiago as the standard, I don’t think anyone besides Francis could really match that level of Yoru play,” he added. “In the end, the way to overcome it was to go back to playing Neon-Yoru again.”
During his brief Global Esports stint and while he was a part of Nongshim RedForce, yoman played against some of his own players, notably Francis, Ivy, and Dambi.
“The image I have of the Nongshim players, since I went up against them as opponents, is quite different from the image I got once I actually started working with them,” he said. “For instance, Francis was primarily an in-game leader in the Initiator role, like the same position I played back when I was a player, but he actually shows much greater impact in the Duelist role, especially while on Yoru. Back then, Ivy was also mainly an Initiator too, but it seems like he’s found a much better fit as a Sentinel.”
In 2024, yoman went up against Sin Prisa Gaming in his final Tier 2 role before signing with Gen.G. yoman and Nongshim lost to SPG, who months later lifted Pacific Ascension with Dambi’s Neon capturing global attention.
“As for Dambi, he’s still just as threatening and skilled as ever, both then and now,” yoman said. “Aside from Dambi, I think I found the other two to be somewhat new and different from what I expected, while Dambi is still as good as before.”
In a previous interview with VALTOUR, yoman said Nongshim would go undefeated at Masters Santiago. While that same level of confidence isn’t quite present right now,
“If you ask me if I have as much confidence as (Santiago), honestly, I don’t, personally,” he said. “The rest of the team seems confident, but I’m just not the type of person who can have that level of certainty in myself. But giving our best effort is a given; that hasn’t changed. We’ll do our best.”
