Published: 7/Feb/2022 17:00 Updated: 7/Feb/2022 14:34
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We spoke to Gabriella ‘LeTigress’ Devia-Allen, LCS’s newest casting talent, about her meteoric rise from high school speech and debate to League of Legends esports,
Esports casting is a difficult business. Especially in a game like League of Legends, where casters have to remember the unique interactions of over 150 champions, and be able to pull those interactions off the tops of their heads to seamlessly conduct viewers through visually messy fights and complicated, chess-like map movements.
Particularly for play-by-play casters, whose job it is to describe events to viewers as they happen. Commonly referred to as shoutcasting, play-by-play is all about balancing information with hype, and delivering that balance in a concise and eloquent package.
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Luckily for the LCS’s newest caster, LeTigress, she’s been practicing the art of eloquence since childhood.
“All my life I’ve been into the entertainment and media industry,” she told Dexerto. “I knew I wanted to be involved in some way, whether behind the camera or in front of it, and so that evolved throughout my childhood and led to a competitive speaking career throughout high school and college.”
Competitive speaking is a niche but beloved aspect of the American high school experience for many. It comes in many different forms, from political debate, to poetry recital, to humorous after-dinner speaking. It’s a way for high school students to develop self-confidence and presentation skills, and can also offer opportunities well into the college years.
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This was the case for LeTigress, whose career in high school speech and debate (also known as forensics) landed her a full-ride scholarship to Western Kentucky university, where she studied broadcasting, TV, and film production with a minor in music as an undergraduate.
At first, esports was never a consideration. But with the inevitable threat of graduation and the real world looming, LeTigress realized that she would need to start looking for a next step.
“I knew then that the road plan was no longer written out, and I knew that I wanted to keep pursuing a lot of the broadcasting and speaking that I’d studied,” she said. “And at that exact moment, my partner introduced me to esports through the NA LCS and EU LCS broadcasts.”
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She’d been a gamer as a child, but “restricted access to video games, for a variety of reasons” had meant she’d been unable to pursue that interest, even just on an entertainment level. But suddenly, she was introduced to a world where a love of gaming and a love of the entertainment industry could go hand in hand.
As is the case for many aspiring to a career in esports, she set out with no real connections within the industry, and with even less of an idea on how to form those connections. She began with the goal of hosting a broadcast in mind, inspired by esports royalty Eefje ‘Sjokz’ Depoortere, who she’d seen on the EU LCS broadcast.
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“I did the thing that a lot of people do, where I’m streaming various games, and then also started streaming my grind from level one to level thirty in League” she explained, “and all the while I was doing a lot of contract work as a video editor, speech coach, nanny, whatever was available.”
The streaming and odd jobs bought her a little time to think more about how to really break into the esports space. She went to graduate school to study communication, which she saw as an opportunity to “build a portfolio and get some creative opportunities.”
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Luckily for her, her tutor on that postgraduate course had a background in the entertainment industry, and offered ample opportunities to practice professional broadcasting and build a portfolio of hosting and broadcasting work. It was in grad school that she finally got her first taste of League broadcasting, doing desk hosting for the NA Challenger series.
“I first showed proof of personality through streaming, creating random content including a bad League of Legends music video,” she recounted, “and the guy in charge of the challenger league saw that and said alright, let’s give it a shot.” She came up through the challenger scene alongside current LCS stars like Eric ‘Licorice’ Ritchie and Kieran ‘Allorim’ Logue, and met industry figures like Daniel ‘dGon’ Gonzales.
“It was a great opportunity to work on my broadcasting skills while going to school,” she added. “That then evolved into working with the broadcast for an indie card game called Duelyst, which was my first instance of casting.”
Casting for a card game requires a significantly different skillset to casting for something like League of Legends, but it was as good an introduction as any to a world of esports broadcasting that she’d never previously considered. The broadcast for Dueltys was small enough that “there were no real host and caster positions, so if you wanted to be on the broadcast you should probably learn to cast.”
And it was there that her love affair with play-by-play casting began.
Another opportunity in the world of casting came in the form of a competition run by games developer Hi-Rez. That was a reality-TV style, eight-episode series called The Caster, and LeTigress submitted a video audition the second she was informed that the show was scouting for contestants.
“On the show, you had to cast all of Hi-Rez’s titles, so Smite, Paladins, and Hand of the Gods, and of the ten people on the show I ended up winning the show and being offered a broadcasting position with Hi-Rez,” she said. “They gave me the choice between an on-camera and off-camera role, and I chose on-camera. And that’s really why I learned play-by-play.”
Here is the winner of The Caster! Congrats @RealLeTigress! pic.twitter.com/ZiXGrPcEsH
— SmitePro ⚡ (@SmitePro) November 1, 2017
Winning the competition gave her the opportunity to interview on-stage at the 2018 SMITE World Championship finals. The final peaked at just over 100,000 viewers on Twitch, according to Esports Charts. Perhaps a lower viewership number than the volumes of fans an esport like League can bring, but it was a chance to work a LAN event and get some reps in on stage.
She worked with Hi-Rez for a while before making the decision to go freelance, represented by talent agency Character Select. She worked in CS:GO and the NA collegiate League of Legends scene, play-by-play casting a League collegiate conference final.
Her appearance at that event connected her with interested parties at Riot, who offered her the chance to host the collegiate championship. That then led to appearances on the Academy broadcast, and later the LCS: first as an interviewer and in 2022, at long last, as a play-by-play caster.
Her debut as a caster for the LCS came on January 21, when she commentated the Group B matchup of Evil Geniuses versus Dignitas alongside Mark ‘MarkZ’ Zimmerman . She’d cast before in Academy, but this was her first time on the biggest stage in NA League.
We all heard @LeTigress knock her first #LCS cast out of the park, but now you can watch it too! 🎥 pic.twitter.com/7uh45YTClU
— LCS (@LCSOfficial) January 22, 2022
“When it comes to any kind of performance, I’ve always had some kind of nervousness,” she said. “One thing I’m learning in terms of being a caster is that knowing yourself, and knowing the mental aspect that goes into broadcasting is so important. I like having a little bit of nervousness, but I don’t let that overtake me, and I make sure to still have confidence in my ability.”
And she’s supported in this new casting foray by some of the most tenured professionals in League of Legends. But she doesn’t get starstruck by the people around her. She sees her colleagues as a “motivator to be able to do the cast justice.”
“If you’re going to be performing alongside people that have these accolades and experience and well-deserved praise for their hard work and talent, then you just want to be able to do what you can to prove you belong there as well.”
She’s constantly “striving for improvement” to match the energy and experience of whoever she’s paired with on a cast, or trio-ed with, as was the case for her second cast of the LCS. She was joined by Joshua ‘Jatt’ Leesman and Sam ‘Kobe’ Hartman-Kenzler for a tri-cast, a difficult but rewarding commentating format involving two analysts and a play-by-play caster.
It’s no mean feat balancing three voices in League commentary. There’s a heavy reliance on things like hand signals and non-verbal communication to ensure that there’s no overlap or dead space in the cast, and LeTigress explained that preparing for the tri-cast involved “a lot of scouting around, talking to fellow talent, and syncing with the people I was going to be casting with beforehand.”
Casting is a constant process of improvement and growth, and nobody is more aware of that than LeTigress. Every cast is an opportunity to work on your technique, and on balancing your personal flair with the concise delivery of information that is a staple of play-by-play.
She admitted that she hasn’t “quite discovered yet where exactly I want to be with that balance”, but noted that her personal casting style is something that she’s “constantly working on”.
LeTigress’s first LCS cast came with more than just the nerves of a broadcast debut. She also became the first-ever woman to cast a game in this competition. The region had had female desk analysts like Emily Rand, and interviewers like Ovilee May and LeTigress herself, but never a female caster. Until now.
“I’m very much someone who is doing what they do because I love it” she explained, “and I think I’m good at it, and because I want to continually be working and improving.”
“I think everybody wants their work to be the focus of how they’re perceived, but I do also have a lot of pride in being able to open doors for other women if there’s anything that comes of my visibility.”
The position of women in esports is a hotly debated topic, but it’s also something which women are relied on far too heavily to be the voice of. There are plenty of talented women in the esports space who are so much more than just their gender, and LeTigress cites many of these talented women as the people who inspired her on her own personal journey.
People like Sjokz, and FPS caster Lauren ‘Pansy’ Scott, have paved the way for women’s visibility in the esports space, simply by being consummate professionals with incredible talent and work ethic in their fields. Much like those who’ve inspired her, LeTigress aims to “normalize” women’s presence in esports through her own work.
“My hope is that, by continually focusing on doing what I want to do, and on being a hard worker, and on trying to get better and better with every day, then there will be some additional benefits to the space and it’s development. I don’t want to be the best woman play by play, I want to be a good play by play caster that is doing their job well.”
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