Ninja steps away from Time In VALORANT roster

Tyler “Ninja” Blevins steps away from his competitive VALORANT team, Time In, to focus on streaming.

Ninja announced that he would step away from Time In during a Twitch stream on May 10. He was expanding into Riot Games’ other competitive title, League of Legends, while speaking on his departure from VALORANT.

“I told the team that I wanted them to find a replacement for me,” Ninja said on stream. “I feel like such a big weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Now I can stream whenever I want, I can get off whenever, right now if I wanted to. I would have had to have gotten off twenty-six minutes ago and been ready for scrims.”

Time In was a name coined from Ninja’s personal brand that reflects the time needed to achieve your goals in life. Ninja’s own clothing and shoe collection through Adidas also follows the same Time In theme associated with his brand. Time In was created by Ninja and started out as a fun way to play with friends in VALORANT tournaments. Before moving to an actual brand, Time In was known as “Team Ninja” in the early days.

Ninja took to VALORANT on release as a beta back in April of 2020. He played with some of his longtime friends Timothy “TimTheTatman” Betar, Ali “Myth” Kabbani and Spencer “Hiko” Martin. When Riot Games began introducing tournaments for VALORANT in March, Ninja gathered his friends to form a team.

Time In has rocky results in minor tournaments

Time In, lead by Ninja, made several appearances at minor league tournaments across the VALORANT scene. Ninja competed alongside his friends in almost all tournaments that took place in the early days of the competition. However, despite the early exposure to competition, Team Ninja, and eventually Time In, saw little success. Their highest placement was at the Renegades and Nerd Street Gamers qualifier where they placed third.

Before the Renegades tournament, Time In placed top eight at the EsportsDoug X eUnited Charity Clash as one of their first tournaments under the title. After taking third however, Time In started a streak of exiting tournaments in the round of 32. They were stuck with the streak for four different tournaments before finally reaching seventh at the JBL Quantum Cup.

Time In’s success was short-lived however as they continued to be one of the bottom teams to consistently compete in VALORANT. Now with Ninja off of the roster, Time In could potentially look to recruit new a new player and break out of their slump.