Shroud comes out of retirement to join Sentinels Valorant Roster
On July 8, Sentinels declared that Michael “shroud” Grzesiek has joined their roster of Valorous. The squad will compete in the North American Last Chance Qualifier for the Valorant Championships, which is scheduled to take place in August, alongside the former professional Counter-Strike player turned well-known streamer. The team’s IGL Shahzeb “ShahZaM” Khan stated on July 1 that the organization needed to deploy a replacement for Hunter “SicK” Mims who was unable to participate in the event. On-stream, he announced that he would take over SicK’s duties as the team’s Controller.
Shroud’s final season of professional play ended in 2019 with the Old Guys Club, a free agent team, and he thereafter gave up using a keyboard and mouse for streaming. He is well known for his stint with Cloud9, where he spent several years as a mainstay of the lineup. His two best results with the group were a second-place showing at ESL One: Cologne in 2017 and a first-place showing at the Americas Minor Championship in Kraków that same year. Outside of show matches and early beta events, he has not participated in any professional competitions in Valorant.
The North American squad has experienced significant turbulence in 2022 as a result of a sharp decline in performance from 2021 and 2020. In Stage 2 of the Valorant Champions Tour, Jared “zombs” Gitlin was replaced by Eric “Kanpeki” Xu, a member of the Akrew. At one point, the team was in risk of not even qualifying for the North American LCQ because Ghost Gaming might have edged them out of a berth in the VCT Challengers playoffs with a single victory.
It will be Sentinels’ first international Valorant competition of the year at Champions if they prevail in the LCQ tournament. As the Sentinels Valorant teams are about to start bootcamp, fans will now have to wait to see how shroud fits into the teams.