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South Korea has a coach for the defense of its Asian Games title in League of Legends. On Thursday, February 12, 2026, the Korea e-Sports Association, known as KeSPA, announced that Kang "Hirai" Dong-hoon will be head coach of the national League of Legends team at the 2026 Asian Games, which take place in Aichi and Nagoya, Japan. Sheep Esports reported the appointment the same day as a joint announcement of KeSPA and the Korean Sport & Olympic Committee, the country's Olympic committee.
The name came with three others. According to the South Korean technology daily Digital Daily, the association confirmed four coaches on Thursday for the esports program of the Games, and said the national team would now begin selecting its players. There is no roster yet. What exists is a staff, a method and a list of players the League of Legends coach is allowed to choose from.
Coaches and player total: KeSPA announcement as reported by Digital Daily, February 12, 2026. Titles: Olympic Council of Asia, February 22, 2025.
How the national coach was chosen
A national team coach in South Korean esports is not picked by a club or by the game's publisher. The post is filled by the association, through a procedure that Digital Daily set out in its report of the announcement.
The process started in December 2025, when KeSPA opened a public recruitment for national team coaches under its own rules on the selection and running of national teams. Applications went to the association's Performance Enhancement Committee, the panel in charge of the sporting side of the national team. The committee read the application files, then interviewed the candidates one by one.
Related readCloud9 promotes IWDominate to head coach as Inero leaves the LCS staffDigital Daily listed what the committee assessed. The first criterion was expertise, which covered the training plan each candidate proposed and their ability as a coach. The second was their record in domestic and international tournaments. The third was attitude and values, which the report described as including a sense of national duty and morality. The committee then recommended one coach for each category, and the association's board of directors gave the final approval.
- Open recruitmentKeSPA opens applications for national team coaches in December 2025.
- File reviewThe Performance Enhancement Committee reads each application.
- InterviewsCandidates are heard one by one on their training plan and record.
- RecommendationThe committee puts forward one coach for each category.
- Board approvalThe association's board of directors confirms the names.
Sheep Esports added the conditions candidates had to meet before they could apply. According to its report, an applicant needed an "A-level" KeSPA coaching license, or had to complete the certification course by 2025, and needed at least three years of experience in the title concerned. Candidates also had to be available to start immediately and free of military or travel restrictions.
Four coaches for six titles
The four coaches do not cover the whole program. The Olympic Council of Asia, which owns the Asian Games, approved 11 esports titles for Aichi-Nagoya at an emergency meeting of its executive board, held online on Saturday, February 22, 2025. The vote was unanimous, the council said, and the list went out the same day in a circular to the national Olympic committees. One of the eleven, which the council calls Competitive Martial Arts, is a team competition that groups three fighting game series, Street Fighter, Tekken and King of Fighters, and awards a single medal.
Digital Daily's report matches the four names to six of those titles. Hirai has League of Legends. Kang Sung-hoon, whom the report presents as the coach of Spirit Zero, keeps the fighting game team, and Yoon Sang-hoon, presented as the coach of Nongshim RedForce, keeps PUBG Mobile, the mobile version of the shooter, which is played at the Games in a version made for the event; both were reappointed after holding the same posts at the previous Games, in Hangzhou. Jung Myung-hoon oversees three titles played by individuals: the racing game Gran Turismo 7, the football series eFootball and the puzzle game Puyo Puyo Champions. The report names no coach for the other five titles.
Related readENCE bring allu back as head coach of its Counter-Strike team| Title | South Korea's coach |
|---|---|
| League of Legends | Kang "Hirai" Dong-hoon |
| Competitive Martial Arts (Street Fighter, Tekken, King of Fighters) | Kang Sung-hoon |
| PUBG Mobile, Asian Games version | Yoon Sang-hoon |
| Gran Turismo 7 | Jung Myung-hoon |
| eFootball series | Jung Myung-hoon |
| Puyo Puyo Champions | Jung Myung-hoon |
| Honor of Kings | None named |
| Mobile Legends: Bang Bang | None named |
| Pokemon Unite | None named |
| Identity V, Asian Games version | None named |
| Naraka: Bladepoint | None named |
Titles: Olympic Council of Asia circular of February 22, 2025. Coaches: KeSPA announcement as reported by Digital Daily.
The announcement concerns head coaches only. It gives no detail on any assistants or analysts who will work under them, and Jung Myung-hoon, who according to Digital Daily won a silver medal at the 2009 Asian Indoor Games in Hanoi, is the only one of the four asked to prepare three titles at once.
A pool of players, not yet a roster
The appointment matters because of what the coach does next. In South Korea's system the head coach takes part in choosing the players, and the association said on Thursday that the national team would start that selection with its coaches, following a plan for the make-up of each squad drawn up by the Performance Enhancement Committee.
The method differs from one title to the next. For League of Legends and PUBG Mobile, Digital Daily reported, players are called up from their teams: the staff names professionals who already play for clubs, instead of holding a tournament to find them. For the other titles the association holds selection competitions, in which candidates play for their place. Across all titles, 37 players are to be selected.
In League of Legends the pool is already defined. Sheep Esports reported that Hirai can choose among the players who took part in the 2025 LoL KeSPA Cup, the association's own tournament. The outlet had written at the end of that event that its results would be used to assess players for the Asian Games, and that only those who competed in it would be eligible.
The cup was played from December 6 to 14, 2025, in what Sheep Esports called the competition's tenth year. Its field counted 14 teams, according to the outlet: the ten clubs of the LCK, the South Korean professional league, two all-star selections from Japan and Vietnam, and two invited teams from the LCS, Cloud9 and Team Liquid. The cup opened with a group stage played in single games, whose group winners went straight to the knockout rounds. T1 won it, beating Hanwha Life Esports 3-2 in a final played as a best-of-five, a series won by the first team to take three games.
Related readFaZe name enkay J head coach after missing the Cologne MajorNeither report gives a date by which the League of Legends roster must be named.
The title South Korea defends
The team Hirai builds will carry a title. At the previous Asian Games, held in Hangzhou, China, in 2023, South Korea won the League of Legends gold medal. The Associated Press reported that the final was played on Friday, September 29, 2023, as a best-of-three against Taiwan, and that South Korea went through the tournament undefeated, China included.
The head coach of that team was Kim "kkOma" Jeong-gyun, according to Sheep Esports.
Hangzhou was also the first time the medal counted. Esports was a demonstration sport, an event shown at the Games without counting in the medal table, in Jakarta and Palembang in 2018, and became a full medal sport in Hangzhou with seven titles, according to the Olympic Council of Asia. The interest was plain in Hangzhou. The Associated Press described a purpose-built esports arena of 4,500 seats, and wrote that esports was the only event of those Games for which tickets had to be allocated by lottery. Of the seven titles played there, five were played on computers and two on mobile phones. League of Legends is one of the titles kept for 2026, when the program grows from seven to eleven.
A coach without a club
One feature of the appointment repeats a pattern. Sheep Esports noted that Hirai, like Choi "Edgar" Woo-beom for the 2018 Games and kkOma for the Hangzhou Games, was selected in a year in which he was not coaching a team. The condition of immediate availability in the recruitment rules points the same way: the job is filled by someone who can work on it from the first day.
Hirai comes from the club game. According to Sheep Esports he began coaching in StarCraft II before moving to League of Legends, then spent two years with Kingzone DragonX and five with KT Rolster, a team he took to the quarterfinals of the 2023 World Championship, the publisher's annual world title event. That tournament was his first on the international stage as a coach, the outlet wrote, and it presents him as the LCK's coach of the year for 2023.
What comes next
The Olympic Council of Asia has set the 20th Asian Games for September 19 to October 4, 2026, in Aichi and Nagoya.
Before then, the next announced step is the one KeSPA described on Thursday: player selection, title by title, with call-ups in League of Legends and PUBG Mobile and selection competitions elsewhere. For the League of Legends team, that means a roster drawn from the December cup field and prepared by a coach appointed seven months before the Games open.
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