Angel Munoz - The Rudder That Steers The Ship
I had the chance to get Angel aside for a half an hour to look inside and see how this man has come so far.
This year the CAL finals were held at the summer CPL.
THG: This year you had the Cyberathlete Amateur League (CAL) finals here at the summer CPL. Can you discuss the integration of the Amateur League and the Professional League?
Angel: What I really what is for all of the CPL events to be seamless. We just changed the management in CAL. Frank Nuccio, who is well known, well respected in the community, and a good friend of mine, was a groundbreaker there. Well he has another business also, a family business. He had a little online league called the Domain of Games. At the time, he had two or three thousand people playing which was quite good. We acquired it from him and we launched it as CAL. He integrated into CAL the same systems that he was used to, and comfortable with. Since the launch, it started growing dramatically and then everything began breaking because the system could not handle it. When his other business started taking off, I told him 'I would really like you to help us on the CPL side.' Also, 'I really think it is time to let the people under you, the people that you have promoted and the ones who are doing a lot of work, to rise up and run CAL because they have some really great ideas on what Cal should be going.' Now I can't say that he threw a party for that. Obviously, it was something that was a part of his heart, so there was a little pain in the departure. Now he does more consulting and works with the community. Although he does not have an official title anymore with the CPL he still works with us in a lot of different areas. I talk to him almost every single day.
On the CAL side we have a new management that is newly focused. It used to be CAL, CPL, CAL, CPL in that there was a rivalry. I mean there were problems between CPL and CAL. People wouldn't talk to each other and there were a lot of problems when communicating. So that was the first hurdle. We are the same but just different aspects of the same thing. So with that resolved, we relaunched CAL.
There was a lot of redundancy. We were saying that we had a little over 300,000 people registered with CAL. We looked into the database and there were almost 50,000 to 60,000 people were counted twice or three times. 'I don't what that.' So the question came, 'Do you want to use that database?' and I said 'Absolutely not!'
Now, people cannot use the same email over and it ties to your IP. Now we know, as close as possible, that we have unique people. It was interesting to us that when we launched the new site that we had 40,000 to 50,000 people register in the first two weeks. That was a proof of concept to me. Now I can take CAL and integrate it more into CPL.
So what you will see is a bad thing and a good thing. We haven't announced this yet, but we will start charging for CAL. We will charge something like $5 to be ranked in CAL and now CAL will have prizes. Therefore, we will go into a pay per play model. If you want to be in CAL, you want to be ranked in CAL, and you want to get prizes, we will provide the prizes for you but you will pay for the experience. Now the reason that you will pay for the experience is because we want our admins to be paid. We believe that if everyone in CAL is paid, you are now a paying customer of CAL and you will demand a certain amount of professionalism. That assures us that if a person is there and he is an administrator for one of the divisions of CAL, he is now responsible. If he does not do his job, he is going to get fired and it is going to hurt him. It is going to hurt in his pocket and that is the worst place you can possibly hurt him. That is our next focus and then the finals we will tie into the CPL events.
Insights And Advice For Event Organizers
The new coliseum.
THG: Some people have a hard time growing from say 200-300 people to 500 and then again to a thousand. You have a different model than the typical LAN party model. What were some of the hurdles that you had to overcome from your original events until now? In other words, how did you get from there to here?
Angel: When we launched the league, initially, we launched it with a team that was composed of the founders of Quakecon. We had Jerry "PoliSh" Wolski, which was the first organizer of Quakecon, Kevin "Monolith" Searle and we had Jim 'H2H' Elson. One of the first things is that they were fantastic groundbreaking people and they got us to the 400 area. But when the company started bringing in large sponsorship we realized that we needed to add staff that they needed to answer to. Those who were more executive level, more top level people. More people that are... well... almost like a brain trust. You have to run your operation. You have to hire the brightest people. I mean that you cannot organize an event like this unless you know someone that thinks in terms of spacial relationships, where do things go, how the carpet runs and all that. And that is the kind of people that you bring in to run your tournament area, the network area, and all. So when we started getting that need for new personel, and some people won't believe me, that some people couldn't work in that new structure. That, a lot of people can't deal with that and so they stick with their original people. Unfortunately, every company goes through that process. When you start, you will start with a group of people, that I'll always be indebted to that are great groundbreakers. But at the same time, you as the leader, you need to have that hat when you are groundbreaking and then you need to get your business hat when you are going from the 500 up, which is tough, because it was tough for us too. We sat at 500 for almost 3 years and we couldn't pass it. And what we realized is that you cater to the largest demographic. So we said let's not fight the trend. Let's get the games here and have the largest demographic. We went in and tied ourselves into the Counter-Strike community, as that has the largest demographic worldwide. That sort of pushed us but the people that we needed to run that were different, so we ended up with a second tier. Now that we have expanded into this type of operation, we are now hiring people, for example, the director of gaming at CompUSA is now one of our employees. He is the guy who was being paid $225,000 at CompUSA who is now working for the CPL.
A shot of the CompUSA booth.
Why? Because he sees the opportunity. So now you get a lot more executive and you build your base with people that understand the community like George. (George Kaspiris who was sitting next to Angel.) George came from being a competitor and now he manages the press relationships because he understands not only the community but he understands the CPL. So he can present our company in a why that is digestible for press and the community. You start making those kinds of decisions. So that is the one end and the other is that you better have your resources.
