On August 7th, 2020, I officially joined 9V.

It surprised some people. For months I had refused every offers to join a clan or team, and then almost immediately after returning to Hyper Dash, I finally joined something.

I was pretty out of the loop when I came back. I hadn't really seen how much everyone had improved while I was gone. There were new players and groups I knew almost nothing about.

For example, some players who played Rec Room Laser Tag competitively had started moving to Hyper Dash. Their group was called CLNM, or Clan Name, and they competed in Dash League Season 1 as TMNM, Team Name.

My First Scrim

On August 29th, 9V organized an internal 9V vs 9V game. It wasn't a Dash League match or anything like that. The clan simply made two teams and scrimmed for fun.

Bartimeus picked me for his team. He was another French Canadian like me who played for ONYX, and would eventually win Rookie of the Year in Season 1 before unfortunately disappearing from the community.

We played against 4thHorseman's team, who was also on ONYX.

We even had a small strategy discussion before playing, making it somewhat my first experience with organized team play.

We lost, but it was fun.

Getting Comfortable

That scrim, and the events that followed it, got me talking more. Before joining 9V, I was very quiet in game. I wrote English all the time, but I still wasn't very confident speaking it.

I was getting more comfortable speaking around these people.

Over the next few months, I regularly joined the 9V games, typically on Saturdays. They weren't really practices for anything. They were just an excuse for us to get together and have some good games.

That became especially valuable after a new VR game called Population: One released and started taking players away from Hyper Dash.

By November, I was complaining about how hard it had become to find good public lobbies. 4thHorseman told me that if I wanted one, I should just ping 9V because plenty of people would jump on to play with me.

Without really noticing it happen, 9V had become one of the main reasons I could reliably find people I enjoyed playing with.

And by then, 9V had also pulled me closer to the competitive side of Hyper Dash.

BRUH

Going back to the beginning of October, 4thHorseman invited me to a scrim team.

It was mostly made up of 9V players, with % from HH (A clan known for having some of the strongest players in the game) being the only exception. A lot of us had little or no competitive experience, and 4th convinced me to join by saying that it wasn't anything formal.

That was important to me.

I liked playing with these guys during our 9V events. Playing together against real teams sounded fun as long as I wasn't committing myself to Dash League.

There was even nothing formal about how the name was decided. Laserpower suggested BRUH because Benson said "bruh" constantly and would wear that tag in game for fun. Everyone liked it enough that somehow it became our actual team name.

Playing Against the Best

On October 4th, BRUH had its first proper team meeting. OddLeviathan, one of ARC's captains, the team that would lose Season 1 finals vs TBD, joined us to go over some basic stuff. It was my first real time going in game specifically to discuss how to play better as a team.

4th immediately began looking for actual Dash League teams to scrim, with OTHR and ViBE among our first opponents. The idea was basically that if we were going to practice, we might as well play the strongest teams we could.

For someone who spent months avoiding competition, I somehow ended up on a team actively looking for strong opponents. Even managing to take some of those games.

Becoming a Real Team

Throughout October and November, BRUH continued scrimming while remaining separate from Dash League.

That allowed players like % and Classicscout to play with us while finishing Season 1 with their actual Dash League team. We tried to keep quiet that both of them were playing with us. They even played as BRUH MAN and BRUH BOY rather than their usual name.

It wasn't against the rules or anything, but some people might have looked at them practicing with another team in a bad way.

BRUH was still just a scrim team but we were starting to realize we were actually not bad at all.

By November, we had spent about a month playing strong teams. On November 8th, after discussing how well BRUH had been performing, Hdi mentioned that we would probably need to finally have "the talk."

It was becoming obvious that BRUH would end up playing Season 2 of Dash League.

The Talk

Population: One complicated things. Several players were becoming less active, and by December we weren't sure if people like Benson, Profit and JRod would return.

% and Classicscout also decided they would play with TMNM for Season 2. % had been helping TMNM during Season 1 and even though he had issues getting them to listen to him at the beginning, they had grown on him.

It was a shame as they were some of our strongest players and if the team wanted to compete, we needed enough reliable players to actually do it.

Toward the end of December, 4th finally asked everyone directly whether we wanted to "ramp up and compete in DL season 2."

A few months earlier, I had joined BRUH partly because it wasn't a Dash League team but now I had to decide whether I wanted it to become one.

4th had six players who seemed committed: Me, Himself, Alpha, Hdi200, Laserpower and Napalm.

When asked to confirm, I said:

I didn't just decide out of nowhere that I wanted to compete. If I were to play in Dash League, I wanted to play with this team, with these guys.

BRUH had started as an excuse for a few of us to scrim together. But eventually, after a few months of playing together, it had really become my team.

So at the end of December 2020, after spending most of the year avoiding competitive Hyper Dash, I finally committed to join Dash League Season 2.