Kathleen knew she was going to quit competitive Apex before she entered the Her Galaxy Apex Legends Open, and winning didn’t change her mind. The $100,000 prize pool is the biggest ever for a women’s Apex tournament, and attracted big names and an even bigger audience.
“When you go into any tournament, you want to be number one, you want to win,” Kathleen explains to me via video call. But the preparations for this one were making her nervous. She’d left her previous team just a month before the tournament because she felt they didn’t have enough chemistry. It was a risk, but she reconnected with Melani, who she’d played a couple of games with years before. They picked up a third, Valefha, who Kathleen had never played with before. It was a makeshift team made up of players who needed a home, but practise felt good, and Kathleen knew she had to make a decision quickly. Team Cuties was formed.
The new trio tried a couple of scrims, but their schedules rarely aligned. This once in a lifetime opportunity looked like it could be slipping away, and Kathleen was nervous about their lack of preparation. “I was watching all of these teams scrim every single day and a lot of the teams, this is what they do,” she says. “They don't have other obligations like school or work like a lot of them are full time content creators, full time streamers. That's a luxury to be able to do that and practice every day with their team.”
Indeed, our own interview had to be scheduled around different time zones and Kathleen’s hectic work timetable. Instead of scrimming, Kathleen and her teammates practised their characters on their own in Apex’s ranked mode. They got together occasionally to play as a team, but mostly played apart. It’s practically a miracle, then, that they had such synergy in the tournament. Kathleen puts a lot of it down to confidence.
“The practice that we had the day before [the tournament] as a team made me feel so confident and I think that was such a key to playing well, the confidence factor.”
Whether Kathleen manifested the win through confidence or they just had what it took in Match Point format, the team had something to prove. In the early stages of the tournament they faced numerous accusations of cheating and transphobia directed at Valefha. They used this as fuel, and winning with an impressive 11-kill match felt that little bit sweeter because they proved their doubters wrong.
Despite winning a fat slice of the biggest women’s prize in the history of the game, Cuties stuck to their promise and split up. Kathleen isn’t sure what she’s going to do next, but isn’t ruling out competing completely. She’s got her eyes set on the big stage, though, name dropping the ALGS on multiple occasions.
“I feel like the women's scene was really created so women had a chance to expand into competitive Apex and practice so they can get into other tournaments,” she says. “The ALGS [Playoffs 2, 2023] just happened and I don't believe that there was one woman competing.
“I think that the women’s scene was created to integrate women into comp because we're not necessarily given those same chances – it's very much a boys club. [Women’s tournaments are] an opportunity to practise, to try out new things, to not necessarily get an all women's team into comp, but to get them to a point where they can try out for a team and be taken seriously because they have some experience.”
Only a handful of women have ever taken to the ALGS Pro League stage, and Kathleen is hoping that the women’s scene can expand to create a better pathway to the big leagues. She envisions coed tournaments for women to play in alongside men as a next step, but the scene between women’s competitions and the ALGS just doesn’t exist yet. There’s always Challenger Circuit, and I half expect her to turn up there in Year 4.
The HerGalaxy Apex Legends Open itself was more of a gateway than most women’s tournaments. Kathleen feels that the huge prize pool made people take it more seriously, and it definitely led to more people tuning in. Once there, they could see that these women can really play, do really practise, and deserve to be on the biggest stages fighting for the eight-figure prizes. There’s a long way to go before there is complete parity in esports, but this feels like a confident first step, for Kathleen and the wider scene.