Promo for the Season 1 Dash League finals.

Until I joined BRUH, most of my understanding of who was good came from playing public lobbies.

The players on ARC were the best players in my mind. I didn't put much thought into it. I just actually ran into them. I knew how strong they were.

But there was TBD who beat them in Season 1 finals.

TBD had been around since the earliest days of Dash League and Hyper Dash. At the center of the team was RDF, they were all an actual family, they were made up of 1v, one of the captains, and his 3 kids, Reko, DarkMoon and Fearless, alongside players like Pietro, Vertigo, EskimoBear and Makers, who was also one of the team's captains.

They won both Season 0 and Season 1 of Dash League, but their players frequently played under different aliases in public lobbies, making it hard to know it was them, so I didn't know just how strong they really were but soon found out.

As BRUH entered the league, I started understanding some of the reasons TBD were so difficult to beat. One of them being how they seemed willing to look for an advantage anywhere they could find one.

Including in something as stupid as the length of their names.

During the Season 1 finals, they realized there was nothing in the rules stopping them from changing their names and team tag to a single letter. It sounds ridiculous, but there was an actual advantage to doing this. Not only did it make it harder for their opponent to tell them apart but also Hyper Dash displayed your name above your head, and a long name could stick out around a corner even when your body was completely hidden. A one letter name would be harder to see. And so team TBD became team D.

Some people in the community weren't very happy that they suddenly did this for finals. It wasn’t just harder for their opponent but also for the commentators to tell them apart. Rules around names eventually followed, but the idea stayed. D continued using shorter names. It was a tiny advantage, but that was kind of the point.

Because D was doing it, and it was an advantage, some of us started shortening ours too. Going into our first season, with a few people joining us, BRUH's roster was 4th (4thHorseman), Titan, Void (Sirvoid), Alpha, Laser (Laserpower), HDI (Hdi200), Napalm, Daddy (DadEThot) and Q.IO (Quadd.io).

Season 2 Begins

In January 2021, Season 2 of Dash League began, and BRUH was officially a Dash League team.

Our first cycle was against i

and F1R3.

We won both, giving us a pretty good start to our first season but that didn't last long.

Our next cycle was against stronger opponents: OTHR and TMNM. They were two of the best teams in the league, and the difference in skill was obvious. We lost both matches.

Just a clip of me falling down on the floor trying to shoot under Tor's shield in the match vs OTHR.

Those first two cycles gave me a much better idea of where we actually stood. We were good enough to be near the top, but there was still a pretty big gap between us and the teams at the very top.

At the same time, we started to put slightly more thought into what we were doing. We watched the better teams, talked about what they were doing differently, and what we could do different. % had left us with some ideas before going to TMNM, and after he left, Titan took on more of that role within BRUH, helping captain for a while and coming up with some simple stuff for our matches. As primitive as they were, they were the first strats we were using as a team. Most of it wasn't noted down but communicated verbally so it was a bit messy.

Titan unfortunately didn’t stay long and also left us for TMNM.

At the end of january, after we were done with our first cycle, I also gave it a try by making these .

And well... they unfortunately didn't work very well.

HHi

For the third cycle of the season, we had to go against AJAX and HHi.

We beat AJAX 2-0, but for HHi it went differently. They were a strong team, but unlike OTHR and TMNM, they were also close enough to us in skill that we could very well win or lose.

On February 20, 2021, we played them.

By this point I was six matches into my first Dash League season, I wasn't used to this whole thing and I think the pressure had slowly been building up without me really noticing it. Against teams like OTHR and TMNM, we lost pretty badly, it wasn’t even close. Losing against them wasn't fun, but since they were clearly stronger, there wasn't this feeling that one mistake from me was going to decide the entire match.

Against HHi, there was.

The match was close, and suddenly every fight felt important. Like the slightest mistake from me could cost us the entire game.

We won the payload but lost domination, and by the end of the domination, I had convinced myself I was playing terribly.

I told the team I wasn’t playing well and should sub out for the tie breaker.

Control Point was used as the tie breaker in Dash League. It was about keeping control of the center of the map for a total of 300 seconds before the opposite team does.

I stayed in after some convincing from my captain, 4thHorseman.

Ironically, I ended up top scoring and we won.

Looking back, I probably wasn't playing nearly as badly as I thought I was. If anything, the problem wasn't how I was playing, but the pressure I was putting on myself to have to play well.

The next day I apologized for "losing my mind" during the match and said that's why I needed to take some breaks.

That same day, BRUH was expanding its roster before the deadline for roster lock. Atomic and Moo joined, and I was glad to have more players because I wasn't sure I would have the time or mindset to keep playing much. When HDI asked if I would at least keep playing league matches, all I could say was "yeah maybe."

It didn't end up happening but I was actually thinking about walking away. We won and I actually played well, but that was almost part of the problem. The more we started winning, the more I cared about the result, and the harder the pressure became to ignore.

And there wasn't much opportunity for that pressure to disappear.

One Point Away

The MMR system placed teams into tiers, with the actual matchups within each tier being random. We weren't lucky with who we ended up against. For cycle 4, we had to go against ARC and D. Two games we lost. So by the end of the season, before playoffs, we had played against D, TMNM, OTHR and ARC, all 4 of the teams considered the best in the league. Meanwhile, some of the teams right above us in the standings had arguably easier opponents.

We finished with 17 RP, just one point away from directly making playoffs.

The way playoff qualification worked had been somewhat controversial throughout the season. MMR determined which tier teams played in, while RP determined who actually made playoffs. This meant two teams could get the same number of points even if one of them had faced much stronger opponents. Some people had been pointing out this problem since early in the season.

Either way, we had missed making playoffs directly by one point.

There were still two spots left, though. But to get one, we would have to earn it through the play-in tournament.

It was a simple single-elimination bracket. The two teams that reached finals would earn the last two spots in playoffs.

The Play-In Tournament

Our first opponent was L1F3.

It went well and we ended up winning. That left us one win away from playoffs.

Our last opponent to gain our spot in playoffs was D3TH.

I didn't think we could win past the first round of playoffs if we made it. Which meant they were the final team we had a shot at beating so I was very determined to win.

We took the match seriously. I watched some of D3TH's games and paid attention to what their players usually did, while % was still helping us even though he left BRUH for TMNM. Before the match, he gave us some advice for Quarry.

Apparently my biggest concern as the ROGUE was if WE could hold hands or not.

The match itself was intense, so intense the hyper dash login servers went down in between maps for about 30 minutes. Payload was close, but we managed to pull off the win. Domination on the map Quarry leaned more in our favor so in the end, we came out on top.

That meant we made playoffs for our first season.

First Ending

There wasn't much time to celebrate, though, because making playoffs also meant we now had to play OTHR.

We knew what that meant. OTHR had already beaten us during the regular season, and they were one of the strongest teams in the league.

We lost.

And just like that, our first Dash League season was over.

We hadn't won anything, but we made playoffs in our first season. For a team that had started only a few months earlier as a group of people scrimming for fun, this wasn’t too bad of an ending.

Meanwhile the league around us was changing.

TMNM had improved enough to get in finals against D instead of ARC. Hyper Dash was no longer in alpha and had officially released a month or two before, bringing a wave of new players into a community that had been pretty small for most of the time I had been playing.

We obviously didn't know yet what some of those new players would become. The best players and teams in the game already seemed unreachable, and yet someone in that new wave would eventually surpass them all and, years later, still be considered the best player the game ever had.

But, for me, the biggest change was how winning had started to matter to me a lot more than it used to.

More than I wanted it to.

I just didn't want to admit it.