Think esports pros aren't athletes? A look inside the intense lifestyle of Team Liquid.
LOS ANGELES — Lunch is served in the team dining room, the chef preparing chicken piccata and fresh greens, but there isn't much time to eat.
Players finish quickly and head for the opposite end of their training facility, past a glass-walled office where coaches pour over game data, past a lobby filled with gleaming trophies. They file into a darkened meeting room to watch film, then commence with practice.
That's when things get heated, everyone keyed-up now, a coach muttering: "This is ridiculous. We have to play better."
Life on Team Liquid does not quite fit the video-game cliché. These aren't teenage boys huddled in their bedrooms, tapping away at keyboards, joking with friends online. This is a professional esports franchise and the mood is serious. When scrimmages finally conclude, many of the players return home to keep practicing on their own past midnight.
"You can go for 15 hours and, physically, you can keep up," one of them says. "The question is, can you keep up mentally?"
Team Liquid competes in the North American league for a popular game called "League of Legends." Ownership spent millions of dollars — no one will say exactly how much — to assemble an all-star roster and create a sleek training facility in Santa Monica in a space that used to house actress Reese Witherspoon's production company.
If all that money got the team favored to win a national title and qualify for the upcoming world championships in San Francisco, it also
