New York Excelsior revealed as newest Overwatch League team

The latest Overwatch League team has been revealed as New York Excelsior, or NYXL. The team was announced early Monday morning via a press release, along with a video.

Excelsior have already picked up the former LW Blue roster from Korea’s Apex tournament, along with that team’s coaching staff. Among the roster will be star player Park “Saebyeolbe” Jong Yeol, and Yeon-oh “Fl0w3R” Hwang will join the team in the second season of the Overwatch League. Both players will represent Korea in the Overwatch World Cup at BlizzCon in just a few weeks.

This is the seventh team officially announced as a part of the Overwatch League, which will begin pre-season play in December, followed by a regular season in January.

As a part of the announcement, Heroes Never Die had a chance to briefly speak to Scott Tester, the team’s director of play personnel about how New York Excelsior chose their name and logo.

Heroes Never Die: How did you guys settle on the name?

Scott Tester: Excelsior is the state motto of New York and it also means ever upward in Latin. So, I think it kind of embodies all of the values we are trying to represent and the spirit of the team we are trying to build.

HND: You certainly have one of the most unique logos in the league, can you talk a little bit about the process of designing that?

ST: It’s something that we have put a lot of thought into. The idea is that the lines and the shapes sort of represent things that are specific to New York like the subway systems, and the skylines and the grid of the city so to speak. We were really looking for something struck a balance between the kind of team we wanted to build and that was representative of what we are trying to put together, but at the same time was just a cool logo and striking visually.

HND: Something that captures the past while also giving a vision of the future, sort of?

ST: I think the logo we created is timeless and well representative of the team.

HND: We talked a lot in our last interview about how you build a roster and how you thought it was important to get a roster that has played together before. So, I wanted to ask how you settled on the LW Blue roster.

ST: I think we looked at a lot of the top teams across the world and felt like the players that we signed to the team were not just people who excelled at the game, because obviously they are some of the best in the world, but were also guys that we felt good about from a personality point of view and guys that we thought could progress and develop, not only into better players, but into better representatives of Excelsior in general.

HND: Is there anything particular you are excited about, or to see people’s reactions too with the official announcement?

ST: The package that we have for the announcement itself is really compelling. I’ve been really impressed to see what all the other teams have done in terms of their announce videos and that sort of stuff, and comparing ours to the others that have been announced, I fell really good about it. But it’s been exciting to see everyone put their stuff out there.

HND: Is there anything else you wanted to add?

ST: Just that we are excited for BlizzCon coming up, we’ve got some players representing South Korea in the World Cup and I’m excited next weekend to watch that stuff. And in general, I’m really excited to launch the team and get everything ready for Overwatch League.