2019 LCS Summer Split

Lore & Background

In the summer of 2019, the North American League of Legends scene was a landscape of entrenched dynasties. Teams like Cloud9, Team Liquid, and FlyQuest had built multi-year rosters and deep fanbases. Into that world walked 100 Thieves, a brand-new entrant whose name was more associated with a broader media and lifestyle brand than with competitive esports. The Summer Split was, in many ways, a public education: a chance to discover where the gap between ambition and execution truly lived.

The organizational identity was still forming. Matt Nadesmat's vision for a professional LoL team was in its first months of operation, and the players were navigating not only the in-game demands of LCS but also the culture of a team that was still figuring out its own internal identity. There was no established fanbase to lean on, no locker-room tradition, no shared history of suffering and triumph. Every series was a first, every loss a data point in a much larger experiment.

Looking back through the lens of a Sentinels fan history, the 2019 splits are the rough, unpolished foundation. They are the season where the organization learned what it was, what it was not, and what it needed to become. The rebrand to Sentinels in 2020 was, in part, a declaration that the 100 Thieves era — experimental, uncertain, still searching — had served its purpose and the next chapter required a sharper identity. The Summer Split of 2019 is where that search began in earnest.

In Their Own Story

The arena lights hummed with a low, electric buzz that you felt in your molars before you heard it. Backstage, the 100 Thieves players sat in a row of identical black chairs, headsets still warm around their necks, watching the next opponent's draft scroll across a monitor that wasn't quite theirs yet. Someone's water bottle was half-empty; someone else kept rewinding the same replay on a phone, mouthing the words of a call that hadn't gone right. The crowd noise bled through the wall in a dull, rhythmic thump — a heartbeat that belonged to a league they were still trying to earn a place in. A coach leaned in, said something short, and the room shifted. Not a pep talk. Just a correction. A single word that meant: *this is how we do it now.* They pulled their headsets back on, and the thumping outside became a countdown.

Reader's Guide

2019 Spring Split (context): 100 Thieves entered LCS for the first time. The Spring half served as the organization's initial immersion into top-tier North American competition, establishing the baseline of what the team could and could not do against seasoned rosters. The experience informed every strategic and roster decision heading into the summer.

2019 Summer Split: The second half of the inaugural season. The team carried the lessons of spring into a fresh start, competing in a double round-robin format against the full LCS field. For a new organization, the Summer Split was less about a single result and more about demonstrating consistency, adapting to the pace of a full LCS schedule, and building the internal culture that would define the next roster cycle. The split's arc — wins, losses, and the grinding middle — became the raw material from which the 2020 rebrand and roster overhaul were shaped.

Aftermath and legacy: The 2019 season as a whole established the organizational template. The decision to rebrand to Sentinels in early 2020 was a direct response to the identity questions that the 2019 splits exposed. The Summer Split, specifically, is remembered by early fans as the season where the team's character was first tested in public — not as a finished product, but as a promise still being written.

Did You Know?

• The team competed as 100 Thieves throughout the 2019 season; the rebrand to Sentinels did not occur until 2020, making this split the last under the original name.
• 2019 was the organization's very first season in the LCS, meaning the Summer Split was only the second competitive block the team had ever played at the top tier in North America.
• The broader 100 Thieves brand, founded by Matt Nadesmat, spanned multiple esports titles and media properties before the LoL team was formally integrated as a competitive unit.
• For early Sentinels fans, the 2019 splits represent the 'pre-Sentinels' era — the unpolished origin story that the 2020 rebrand was designed to move beyond.