Los Angeles, California - Taped 15 minute audio interview with Alex "Jax" Conroy, owner of Jax Money Crew. Conroy is interviewed by GotFrag Editor in Chief, Mark Cheben from the floor of the venue at the 2007 CGS Qualifier at The Bridge.

Download the audio file here.

I'm here with the man behind JMC, Alex Conroy. Alex you guys did really well with the opening round. How would you describe how your team is feeling, how they're playing. Now, I realize this is an easier group stage but is this a preview of things to come?

Well my games came to play, it’s a LAN environment and that’s an environment where experience really comes into play. My guys have a lot of experience playing in front of crowds in various countries. The noise, the crowd, the commentary, they can drown all that out and really focus on the game. They're a high energy team and that showed today. As far as it being an easy group, SXP isn't exactly a push-over team; I mean they did beat us online. However, as I said, the LAN is our environment and our performance today reflected that.

Your lineup is three of the five that played at the KODE5 finals in Beijing, China. You've added aZn and you've added Dominator, how has replacing Ian and Desire with these two new players affected your teams play and chemistry.

I felt their performance at KODE5 really wasn't... what it needed to be. So I feel we have really improved from there. As far as replacing Ian, he is a great guy but the team showed instant improvement when we replaced him, which showed in our CPL victory over EG in a convincing fashion. As far as Shawn (Desire), Shawn is a great captain, and probably one of the best guys I’ve ever worked with as far as his character. But under the leadership of David the team has made the transition to Source a bit smoother. As far as Josh, he is one of the best guys I’ve ever worked with. He's got his head in the game. He's got his eye on the ball. As far as Kevin (aZn), he is a dominating force in the game. The addition of him to any team would help them.

I guess I could be so bold as to say that CEVO is the current rubric from which all the teams are being judged by and how they are performing. With Complexity dominating that league along with teams that were dominating then lost members, changed names, all kinds of stuff. Would you say CEVO is an accurate judge of how your team would compare against the rest of North America, and how have you guys practiced to kind of move past what wasn't quite an optimal performance online.

I wouldn’t say that CEVO is an accurate representation of how we will compete in Source at all for a few reasons. One being that we were playing 1.6 at the same time and not concentrating our full attention on Source at the time because we felt we had an obligation to finish out that season at that time. Another factor would obviously be that the leadership has changed. David has approached source in a slightly different way than Shawn did. It seems to be working really well and the guys have been effectively practicing. Of course nothing was Shawn's fault, he was a great leader and a great captain for JMC but David's approach has really helped.

Finally, our roster is different. And I feel that if you look at our performance in CEVO as opposed to our current performance... we're having strong LAN performance and recently we've had two big wins in the Stride Xfire Cup beating EFG and 3D. You know, EFG being a team that we had lost to only two days before that match by a large margin. I feel my guys are progressing quite rapidly. I feel we have some catching up to do but I'm confident that we'll get there by the time we need to get there.

You said that Zid's approach was different than Desire's. How would you describe the approach to others who may be looking to make the same transition?

I think that the transition from 1.6 to source does require that you recognize that you are in fact learning a new game and essentially you are a new player. You can't go into it with an attitude that you're already professional at the game. You really need to humble yourself, adapt and be able to take advice and be willing to simply learn. I think that is what David has really done; I feel that he has humbled the team into realizing that they have work to do.