Cloud9 promotes IWDominate to head coach as Inero leaves the LCS staff

Cloud9 will start the second half of its League of Legends year with a different person in charge. The North American organization announced on Friday, June 26, 2026, that head coach Inero has left and that IWDominate, until now part of the same staff, takes over as head coach, Sheep Esports reported that day. It is the first head coach role of IWDominate's career.

The change goes beyond one post. Two assistant coaches arrive, Arrow and YamatoCannon, and Veigar v2 stays on as strategic coach. On the same day, Cloud9 officially announced the return of the midlaner Loki and the arrival of the AD carry Tactical, building a roster of seven players for the Summer Split of the LCS, North America's top league.

Sheep Esports, June 26, 2026, for the record and the staff; Riot Games' LCS Summer primer, June 15, 2026, for the Worlds places.

Four coaches, one new head

A League of Legends team does not have a single coach, and Cloud9's announcement changes three of its four coaching posts. The head coach leads a staff whose work runs from practice to the draft, the phase before each game in which the two teams pick and ban the champions, the characters each player will control. Cloud9 splits that work between a head coach, a strategic coach and two assistant coaches.

Cloud9's Summer staff, as listed in the announcement Sheep Esports relayed, has four members.

Inero is not on the list. Sheep Esports' report of the roster announcement says he has stepped down, and its report of the staff change says he is leaving; neither report gives a reason for his departure.

IWDominate moves up from inside. Sheep Esports describes him as a member of the staff who previously assisted the team, so the new head coach already knows the players, the routines and the organization. Veigar v2 brings the longest continuity: he is entering his sixth year at Cloud9, according to the same outlet.

A spring that won awards but not a ticket

The timing follows a first half of the year that came close twice. Cloud9 reached the grand final of the LCS Lock-In, the competition that opens the North American season, and lost it to LYON to finish second, Sheep Esports noted.

The Spring Split went better for most of its length. Cloud9 won all seven of its regular-season series, a 7-0 record, Sheep Esports noted. The league's own awards reflected it. On its Spring awards page, published on May 19 and completed as the results came in, Riot Games named Cloud9 Kia, the name under which the team competes with its sponsor, as its Coaching Staff of the Split. That was the staff Inero led.

The sponsor's name is part of the team's identity in the league. Cloud9 announced Kia as the entitlement partner of its League of Legends team on January 14, 2025, which puts the carmaker's name beside the club's. The club uses that name itself: on January 20, 2026, it announced that Cloud9 Kia and PAGODA Snacks had renewed their partnership through the 2027 LCS season.

The players were rewarded too. The support Vulcan was named the Spring Split's most valuable player, an award the league announced on June 11. Four Cloud9 players made the league's All-Pro Teams, announced on June 4, the line-ups of the best player in each of the five positions: the top laner Thanatos and Vulcan on the first team, the jungler Blaber and the midlaner APA on the third. LYON and Team Liquid Alienware also placed four players each and FlyQuest three; no team placed more. No Cloud9 player made the second team.

The playoffs told a different story. Cloud9 beat FlyQuest 3-2 in a best-of-five, a series won by the first team to take three games, and then lost twice without taking a game, to LYON and to Team Liquid Alienware. The team finished third, one place short of qualification for the Mid-Season Invitational, the international tournament in the middle of the year, according to Sheep Esports. The league's awards page lists the Spring Finals in Tempe, Arizona, with the semifinals on June 13 and the final on June 14.

Third place still carried something. Sheep Esports wrote that Cloud9 earned a funded bootcamp, a training camp with its costs covered, during MSI 2026, which includes the SOOP Global tournament.

Who joins the staff

Arrow is a South Korean coach starting his third year in the job. Before coaching, he played as an AD carry, the ranged damage dealer of the bottom lane, and Sheep Esports notes that he has played alongside APA, now one of Cloud9's two midlaners.

YamatoCannon has coached in EMEA, the region that covers Europe, the Middle East and Africa, as well as in Russia and in Korea, and this is his first job in the LCS, according to Sheep Esports. The outlet describes him as a former coach of Los Ratones, a European team.

The two arrivals give the staff a new shape. With IWDominate moving up, the Spring staff loses its head coach but keeps its strategic coach, and the two assistant posts are filled from outside the organization: one coach with experience in Korea and one with experience in Europe.

A seven-player roster

The coaching change came with a roster announcement. Cloud9's Summer line-up has seven players instead of five, with two options in each of the carry positions, Sheep Esports reported.

In the mid lane, Loki returns. He was Cloud9's midlaner throughout the 2025 season, then went back to South Korea, where he spent two splits with HANJIN BRION in the LCK, the Korean league. This year he played seven regular-season series there and one game against Dplus KIA in the Road to MSI, according to Sheep Esports. HANJIN BRION announced his departure one day before Cloud9 announced his return; the outlet wrote that the Korean team released him after he said he wanted to play abroad again. He shares the position with APA.

The return closes a short loop. Loki first came to North America in 2025, moving to Cloud9 together with Thanatos, another Korean player, Sheep Esports wrote in February. That year Cloud9 finished in the top three or four of the first split, reached the final of the second, a run that qualified the team for the Esports World Cup, and ended the summer just short of the podium. HANJIN BRION signed Loki, then 21 and in his fifth year as a professional, on February 27, 2026, for the rest of 2026 and all of 2027. Four months later, the Korean team let him go, and he is back on the roster he left.

At AD carry, Tactical joins Zven, who stays. The rest of the starting positions are unchanged: Thanatos in the top lane, Blaber in the jungle and Vulcan at support.

Sheep Esports wrote that the roster has two backups in the carry positions and that Cloud9 appears to be building a setup in which APA and Loki can both remain part of the active rotation. Neither report says how the staff will choose between them from week to week. That choice now falls to IWDominate and his assistants.

What the Summer Split decides

The summer carries the bigger prize. Riot Games' primer for the LCS Summer Split, published on June 15, describes a regular season played as a round robin of best-of-three series: every team meets every other once, and a series ends when one team has won two games. The top six teams go to the playoffs, which include an expanded lower-bracket gauntlet, a path in which a team that has lost a series can still climb back by winning one series after another.

The top three LCS teams qualify for the World Championship, which, in the primer's words, returns to the region later this year; tickets go on sale in July. Missing the podium in summer therefore means missing Worlds on home soil.

Cloud9 knows that outcome. Sheep Esports wrote that the organization wants a successful Summer Split to avoid a repeat of last year, when it missed Worlds qualification. The team has not won a title since the Spring Split of 2023, according to the same outlet.

The calendar ahead

Riot Games' primer sets the dates. The Summer Split opens on July 25 and 26, and the regular season runs for seven weekends, opening week included, to September 5 and 6. Weeks two to six are played at Face Off Studio. The playoffs follow on September 12 and 13, then two longer weeks, from September 18 to 20 and from September 25 to 27.

The LCS Championship, the final weekend of the season, is played on October 3 and 4 at Gas South Arena in the Atlanta area, in Georgia. The primer had not yet published the matchups of the regular season.

Before any of that comes the bootcamp, which Sheep Esports places during MSI. Cloud9 will then have until its first LCS series of the summer, on the weekend of July 25 and 26, to settle a staff that has a new head coach and two new assistants, and a roster that has seven players for five places.

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