NRG officially welcome daps and Chet to their VALORANT division

One of the most successful North American esports organizations, NRG, has been setting tongues wagging for a few weeks already. After seeing other big organizations from the region being present on the VALORANT scene, such as TSM, Dignitas, and Sentinels, it was just a matter of time till we see NRG investing in the title as well even though, in the middle of September, co-CEO of NRG, Andy Miller, said it is still “too early” to do so. He also described the current state of the competitive ecosystem as being in its “first inning of the game,” which doesn’t offer enough stability to tempt a huge commitment out of NRG Esports. Surprisingly, not long after that, the first rumors emerged about NRG seeking for the individuals to complete their North American lineup.

It seems like the “right time” for the organization is now, as today on October 6th, 2020, they welcomed two out of three rumored members to their roster. The first one is a former Counter-Strike player, Damian "daps" Steele.

daps has been an active player since 2012. He started his career as a part of Dynamo Gaming’s roster and over the years played for big organizations such as Team Liquid, OpTic Gaming, Cloud9, and most recently Gen.G. daps’ transition to NRG is not his first time in this organization, as he used to be part of NRG’s CS:GO roster back in 2016, where he also acted up as a coach of the team in the later years. The 27 years old Canadian has a lot of trophies under his belt including among others Intel Extreme Masters XIII Shanghai and cs_summit 3 won with NRG and DreamHack Open Anaheim 2020 with Gen.G. On September 11th, he announced his departure from Gen.G which started speculation about his possible switch to VALORANT.

The second member of the squad is a coach, Chet “Chet” Singh, who also was part of NRG in the past. Known previously as ImAPet, he worked for a lot of successful CS:GO teams over his career. He led the NRG squad to many victories, followed by success under Evil Geniuses’ banner after the organization acquired the NRG squad. At the end of his CS:GO career, he spent his days in 100 Thieves, revealing at that time in an interview with HLTV.org that he received offers to coach VALORANT squads, but wanted to stick to CS:GO.

The daps and Chet duo is reuniting once more and are more than ready for other success in a new game. While we are still waiting for the announcement of the rest of the members of this squad, it’s worth reminding that the other player that was linked in the rumors with NRG’s VALORANT lineup was another CS:GO player, Sam “s0m” Oh.

Do you think the speculations will turn out to be true similar to today’s announcement? Should NRG focus on the retired CS:GO players while creating their roster or should they scout young individuals that are shining as free agents on the North American scene? Let us know in the comments!

The current NRG lineup is:

Damien “daps” Steele

Chet “Chet” Singh (Coach)