The Call of Duty League Launch Weekend at The Armory is just days away (Jan. 24-26), and that means our very own Minnesota Røkkr will be making their (hopefully triumphant) debut very, very soon. With two tough matches in the coveted final slots of both Friday and Sunday and pressure of being the home team, the team’s mettle is sure to be tested.
And that’s without the extra layers of drama sprinkled on top of both matchups.
We caught up with Brett Diamond, Minnesota Røkkr COO, to get the scoop on why both launch-weekend opponents are more than your average Call of Duty faceoff.
“I think the league did a great job of scheduling the matches for this weekend,” Diamond said. “They’ve really created a lot of great storylines between different teams and individuals. Both of the teams we’re going to play have interesting storylines behind them.”
Brett Diamond: There’s a very interesting storyline here. Two of our players, Silly (Justin Fargo Palmer) and Assault (Adam Garcia), were on the team with Evil Geniuses that won the previous league’s championship two seasons ago… the captain of their Evil Geniuses team is now the captain of the Los Angeles Guerrillas — Aches (Patrick Price). It’s a team that our players have a very interesting backstory with, and it will be a fun match to open our season with. It’s the closing match of the first day of competition, and that was the slot we wanted our first match to be.
BD: We’ve had a fun, good-natured rivalry going back and forth mostly on social media since the day we announced our team. Toronto was one of the five teams that announced their existence before us. When we announced that we would be in this league on July 1, we didn’t have a name yet, but our early graphics had “north” in them like most of the teams in this market do. Toronto took a little issue with that. They tried to claim the north for themselves. In a Twitter post responding to that, we just very clearly pointed out that the latitude of Minneapolis/St. Paul is a few degrees higher than Toronto. We let the facts speak for themselves.
But it’s a very good-natured rivalry, and we have a lot of fun with it. They’re a good group. A lot of fans on social media have gotten into it and have shared lots of gifs and memes back and forth.
We were really excited when the league announced the schedule, and we found out that we’d be playing them for the final match of Sunday night to close launch weekend.
Interested in checking out the Launch Weekend in person? Get your tickets here, and be sure to check back soon for our in-depth Q&A with Brett Diamond later this week.
