The ashes settled for the Dallas Fuel on Tuesday after a fiery start to the week.
The Fuel released their head coach, an assistant coach and their superstar damage player in the span of six hours Monday afternoon, with the evening concluding with Aaron “Aero” Atkins parting ways with the squad he’s helped lead since 2018.
Aero spoke with The Dallas Morning News regarding his separation, marking his first public comments about the situation outside of his own Twitter thread Monday evening.
Here’s a collection of topics discussed by the Fuel’s former head coach:
The deal with Decay
Aero started the discussion by talking about the abrupt departure of Jang “Decay” Gui-un, the Fuel’s explosive damage star and early season MVP candidate.
When the Fuel acquired Decay in October 2019 from the Los Angeles Gladiators in exchange for Son “OGE” Min-seok, Aero and the coaching staff had to make a decision. Should they build around him, or try to slot them in? How could the Fuel maximize that potential?
For a while it worked, especially at the beginning of the 2020 season, Aero said. Decay was relentless in matches and tried to the best of his abilities.
That didn’t last. Envy Gaming Owner Mike Rufail revealed that Decay’s willingness to practice and cooperate with the team faded as the season progressed. Aero confirmed that, but said it wasn’t as simple as Decay refusing to practice.
“I’ve seen a lot of speculation in terms of the timing and that there was a falling out between me and Decay, but nothing like that happened,” Aero said. “At the end of the day, Decay wasn’t happy and there wasn’t a resolution that could make everyone happy. I think management made that decision with Decay to part ways because they didn’t feel like there was a world where Decay could be happy with everything and there would be a perfect fix to the things Decay had going.”
The decision that Rufail and the Fuel ultimately made about Decay was after about a month of discussion, Aero said.
During the final stretch of Decay’s time with Dallas, when he played just three maps in 12 opportunities, the Fuel had to look at the team as a whole. Could the Fuel sustain this issue for the remainder of the season and find success? Could the team work in this environment where a star player was losing motivation to compete with the team?
The answer was ultimately: no.
“We made changes throughout the year that we felt like were things that would help the stresses the team was facing from week to week,” Aero said. “But there wasn’t a suitable solution for all parties that would lead to a level that everyone wants to be at.”
Aero’s own separation from the Fuel did have some similar similarities, he said. It was a while in the making.
Aero gone
The official decision about Aero’s future with the Fuel was made on Monday.
Parting ways with Decay and assistant coach Louis “Tikatee” Lebel-Wong was made before then, Aero said, but the head coach was notified he was on the outs after those two announcements.
No matter the result, and no matter the reason, the blame was always going to be on Aero, he said. And he was OK with that. He was the head coach and the responsibility for anything that happened within the team, matches or staff was on him.
Aero didn’t have any ill will toward Rufail. The former head coach said he already had some talks about a role change for himself at the end of the 2020 season.
“We hadn’t gotten that far in the talks but they knew I was looking for a change. I even offered to oversee a coaching transition or something,” Aero said. “It’s not this crazy thing where they were just like, ‘you got to go.’ I understand that (Rufail) has a responsibility to fans and the team to make the best staff decisions just like I had that responsibility with the team’s performance.”
Team morale
“High highs and low lows,” was the common phrase Aero used in his interviews with The News throughout the season. This was something about the Fuel that could change day to day, but it’s also an area Aero felt he failed as a head coach.
As social distancing became the norm in March during the start of a global pandemic, the Fuel were no longer able to interact with each other physically. That took a toll on the Fuel’s companionship, Aero said.
“When you’re away from each other a lot of that camaraderie is hard to maintain and we lost a lot of that over time,” Aero said. “One of the things that I kind of failed at this year was maintaining that without all being in the same place. I think that’s where the motivation stuff becomes more up and down and we have the serious highs and low lows.”
Tikatee brought up the loss to the Vancouver Titans on June 20 as a low point. The Fuel were dealing with a shakeup in their DPS roster. Zachary “ZachaREEE” Lombardo retired on June 3, Decay was taking a personal break from the game and Stefan “Onigod” Fiskerstrand was signed on June 19 and asked to immediately contribute.
The Fuel actually recovered well enough to win three out of their next four matches after losing to Vancouver, but the problems within remained. No matter the winning or losing, the Fuel needed to do something different, and that’s what led to Monday’s transactions.
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