Team Vitality has officially unveiled its long-awaited Counter-Strike academy, bringing the five players previously known as “Project H” under the black and yellow banner as Vitality Academy. The announcement lands eight years after the French organisation entered Counter-Strike, and arrives while the main roster sits on top of the world as back-to-back Grand Slam winners.

You’ve asked for it
Now it’s here

INTRODUCING THE VITALITY ACADEMY pic.twitter.com/P5djPYfLJ3

— Team Vitality CS (@TeamVitalityCS) April 22, 2026

The inaugural academy lineup pulls together young talent from across Europe, with ages ranging from 16 to 19. The group has already been playing together for months under the Project H codename, and they come in with competitive results to show for it.

The Vitality Academy Roster

The five-player lineup is anchored by 16-year-old AWPer Ulysse “katkame” Thiebault, who has been openly backed by Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut as one of the most promising French prospects in the scene. Katkame was ZywOo’s bold prediction pick back in 2025, and he is also managed by the world number one’s own Prodigy Agency, which ties him closely to the Vitality ecosystem before he has even played a Tier 1 match.

Alongside him is Luca-Adrian “lucaZ” Gavrilut, a 17-year-old Romanian who came through NAVI Junior and built a reputation on FACEIT as one of Europe’s standout young riflers. Estonian talent Aleks “Reqqen” Frolov, also 16, rounds out the younger core with what Vitality describes as explosive mechanical upside.

The structural backbone comes from 19-year-old Ukrainian in-game leader Kirill “Dafra1D” Polieiko, who has already been tested in higher-tier environments. Slovakian rifler Patrick “patrenzo” Hauer, 17, completes the five.

ON A ENFIN UNE ACADEMY SUR CS@Katkamee @_lucaZ_cs @Dafra1D @patrenzocs @alekscs2 @VdaK1NG (coach) https://t.co/nJphgWFux2 pic.twitter.com/5x4uUJRaH4

— Team Vitality 🐝 (@TeamVitality) April 22, 2026

Coaching Staff And Main Roster Link

Heading the coaching side is Pablo “VdaK1NG” Escobar, who joined Vitality as a data analyst in September 2025 before stepping into head coach duties for the Project H group. On X, he wrote that the dedicated head coach role was not originally part of his plan, but that the team had been gelling well enough for him to take it on and keep helping Vitality make history three years down the line.

Team management falls to Matthieu Péché, a former Olympic canoeing medalist who ran the Vitality Counter-Strike main roster from 2018 to 2025. His move across to the academy puts one of the organisation’s most experienced operators directly in charge of shaping how the next generation is developed day to day.

Vitality has built in direct connective tissue between the academy and the senior team. The academy will share practice sessions, feedback loops, and bootcamps with the main roster, and players are set to be exposed to LAN competition alongside the development schedule.

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Project H Already Has Results On The Board

The Project H group is not arriving as an untested experiment. They have already qualified for the Season 56 Finals of ESEA and knocked off Metizport in the CCT Contenders qualifiers, which gives the academy a competitive floor to build on rather than a blank slate.

That matters for how the project is framed. Vitality is not using the academy to patch a talent problem on the main roster, which currently has none. Instead, the five are walking in with momentum and a coaching staff that has already seen them perform under pressure.

Where Vitality Academy Fits In The Wider Scene

Vitality is the latest major Counter-Strike organisation to formalise an academy, following the path laid by NAVI Junior, MOUZ, and Spirit Academy. Those programmes have produced some of the most recognisable names in the current Tier 1, including Ilya “m0NESY” Osipov and Drin “makazze” Shaqiri out of NAVI Junior, Dorian “xertioN” Berman from MOUZ, and Danil “donk” Kryshkovets through Spirit Academy.

The economic case has become harder to ignore in 2026. Player prices in Counter-Strike 2 have climbed to the point where roster stagnation is a genuine issue at the top, and academies double as both a direct revenue lever through player sales, as seen with Maksim “kyousuke” Lukin, and an indirect one by producing in-house replacements that sidestep the transfer market entirely.

For Vitality specifically, the angle is slightly different. The main roster is dominant and has no immediate need to churn. The academy becomes a long-horizon bet on embedding the organisation’s systems and protocols into young players early, so that when transitions eventually do happen, the replacements already speak the same tactical language as the staff that built the current dynasty.

Vitality’s Track Record With Academies

The Counter-Strike academy is not the organisation’s first crack at this model. Vitality already fields a League of Legends academy, Vitality.Bee, which competes in the LFL and has produced senior roster players including Kadir “Fleshy” Kemiksiz and Kaan “Naak Nako” Okan.

The organisation also ran a short-lived Valorant academy under the VIT.Revolution banner. That roster disbanded after VCL France Stage 2 in May 2025, but did successfully promote Ștefan “Sayonara” Mîtcu into the main Valorant lineup before winding down, showing that even a brief academy run can deliver a promotion if the pipeline is structured correctly.

What Comes Next For Vitality Academy

With a confirmed roster, a dedicated coach, and an experienced manager in place, Vitality Academy’s next visible checkpoint will be the ESEA Season 56 Finals and the continued CCT Contenders run, where Project H’s existing results were built. The longer-term measure will be whether any of the five eventually graduate to the main roster, or are sold on in the kind of high-value transfer that has defined the academy model at NAVI and Spirit over the last few years.

Vitality President Fabien “Neo” Devide framed the launch as a commitment to the ecosystem rather than a short-term play, saying the organisation wants to perform now while also building the champions of tomorrow and lifting the broader scene with it. The next three years, by VdaK1NG’s own timeline, are where that ambition gets tested.

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