Spirit Academy unveil a new 2026 lineup under coach S0tF1k

Team Spirit's Counter-Strike 2 academy has a new lineup for 2026. HLTV, the Counter-Strike news and statistics site, reported it on Wednesday, February 18, 2026: a new five with a new in-game leader, and a project that remains under the control of its coach, S0tF1k.

HLTV describes Spirit's academy as a well-respected talent factory, and the new lineup is built in that spirit. The site presents it as a mix of players kept from 2025, a return to the first five and a promotion from one of the club's younger teams. For an organization whose academy exists to train players before they reach the top level, the start of a season is the moment that work begins again.

An academy team is a second roster that an organization runs below its main team. It plays in smaller tournaments, with younger players, and it exists so that those players learn the job before they are asked to do it on the biggest stages, at the club that trained them or elsewhere.

HLTV report of February 18, 2026, and S0tF1k's HLTV interview of September 26, 2025.

Who makes up the new five

The player who carries the most responsibility is the new in-game leader, the player who calls the team's tactics during a match and decides, round by round, where the five go and what they try. HLTV notes that he has already played a few LanDaLan events, a series of tournaments held in a venue rather than online, with the team Chimera.

Around him, the lineup mixes continuity and promotion. HLTV's report describes a return, a player kept in his role from the previous lineup, and a step up from Spirit Academy Black, one of the club's younger teams. The site also notes that two of the five are still relatively unknown to the wider scene.

The coach is the constant. S0tF1k, who is 31, remains at the head of the academy, in HLTV's words, after a year in which the roster he worked with had to be rebuilt.

The players who graduated in 2025

The new lineup exists because the old one did not stay together. HLTV's report recalls the prospects who graduated from the academy in 2025, and its profile boxes show three of them now playing for other teams. In academy terms, a player graduates when he leaves the development roster for a team at a higher level, inside the club or outside it.

None of the three went to Spirit's own main team. One went straight to the top level, one to the second roster of another organization, one to another club.

S0tF1k described how that happened in an interview with HLTV published on September 26, 2025, conducted in Russian and translated by the site's staff. He said that one of his players received an offer he could not turn down, and that the roster then fell apart and had to be rebuilt. He also said that earlier offers for other members of the team had been turned down, because the team believed in itself at the time. And he expected that the players who remained could now receive offers of their own. In the February report, HLTV's profile box shows that player with HEROIC B, the organization's second roster. The February report also points readers back to the September interview.

That is the cycle the coach describes: a young player becomes good enough to be noticed, other teams make offers, and the academy rebuilds with the next group.

kyousuke and the step to tier one

The best-known of the three is kyousuke. In the same September interview, S0tF1k said that the player had made his full debut in tier one, the informal name for the teams that play the biggest tournaments, with Falcons.

The coach was pleased with what he saw. He said that kyousuke had been given a lot of freedom in his new team, and that his play looked much as it had under S0tF1k in the academy. He credited zonic with keeping the player comfortable after the move. In the profile boxes of HLTV's February report, kyousuke is listed with Falcons.

HLTV's report on the new lineup names kyousuke beside donk as earlier main men of the academy, and writes that the new players will try to follow in their footsteps. donk is listed in the same report with Spirit's main team, which makes him the example every academy player knows: a player trained inside the club who is now a starter for its first team.

S0tF1k himself cited donk and kyousuke in September as players who developed quickly. He added that both were very strong mentally, a quality he does not consider proven in any young player until it has been tested at a higher level.

How Spirit's academy is organized

Spirit Academy is not a single team. In his September 2025 interview, S0tF1k described a main academy team and, below it, three younger teams named Black, White and Green, Green being the youngest. He said Green has a slightly different structure from the others and is coached by hurtsxlrd, who is 22 and new to coaching.

He added that his established players had been with him for a year and a half, and that they understood the team's structure far better than the newcomers did. That gives a sense of how long a young player can spend inside the structure before a move.

The coach also explained how players reach the academy. In the past, he said, he sometimes signed players knowing little more than how they performed on FACEIT, the online platform where players play ranked matches. He now looks further: he listens to their voice communications on TeamSpeak, the voice chat software players use during practice and matches, follows their practice and watches their official matches, to judge how they talk to teammates and how they progress. Recent recruits, he said, had played seriously for only a couple of months.

Inside the academy, places are not guaranteed. S0tF1k said that players who struggle on the academy's main team are replaced by those waiting on the bench, and he compared that competition for places with the bench of a football or basketball team. He called it healthy competition that helps the players. He also said he wants young players to learn discipline, and how to act inside a team, from the start.

What the academy played in 2025

The September interview was recorded at a difficult moment, which gives an idea of the level the academy plays at. Spirit Academy had just gone out of Majestic LanDaLan 3 without winning a map, beaten 2-0 by 33 on Thursday, September 25, and 2-0 by Betera on Friday, September 26, 2025. HLTV's interviewer noted that the team had won the two previous LanDaLan events.

S0tF1k took the blame for the exit himself. He said his preparation had focused on adding more actions when the team needed to go back to more basic things, and that the players lost confidence.

The 2026 roster starts with a different group, and HLTV's report names no first tournament for it.

Spirit's main team, one step above

The team the academy feeds is in good form. On Sunday, February 8, 2026, Spirit took third place at IEM Krakow 2026, beating MOUZ 2-0 in the third-place match at the Tauron Arena, 13-8 on Dust2, Spirit's own map pick, and 13-3 on Mirage, HLTV reported. The match was a best-of-three, in which the first team to win two maps takes the series. HLTV's headline credited sh1ro with the standout display, and donk and magixx closed out Mirage. The win extended the run Spirit had built against MOUZ in the second half of 2025 to five matches in a row.

The five that played in Krakow was sh1ro, tN1R, donk, zont1x and magixx. In HLTV's world ranking of February 2, 2026, Spirit stood seventh.

That gives the academy's ambition its measure. A place on Spirit's first team means displacing one of the five players who finished third in Krakow. Of the three former academy players HLTV lists in its February report, all now play for other clubs.

What comes next

Spirit's new lineup, as HLTV reports it, comes with the roster and nothing more: no tournament, no date for a first match and no target for the season. The team's first official matches with the new five are still to be announced.

For the coach, the work restarts where it always does. S0tF1k said in September that he saw a couple of players in his structure who could make a name for themselves on the scene, without naming them, and that their mental strength had yet to be tested at higher levels. The 2026 lineup is the group he now works with.

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