It’s the one year anniversary of 11 ft 8 Bridge after we completely revamped our team! About an hour after making the below post, Glack reached out about being team manager and the rest is history.
I’ve been playing competitive Splatoon since the launch of S3 and was reeling from Nonbinary Fuss (my first team lasting nearly 3 years) imploding following me stepping back from the team. I had attempted to step back from a leadership position but was still facing major mental health challenges to the point that continuing to play on the team was detrimental to everyone involved. I learned some hard lessons and immediately tried again at another team with Renzo, 11 ft 8 Bridge. Renzo and I had played on a Low Ink pickup of the same name a few months ago and it felt like a breath of fresh air, the synergy between us was there. We wanted to try and realize this idea and now was an opportunity for a fresh start from NBFuss disbanding.
But wait, what happened to that team with a somewhat different roster? Despite our best efforts and attempting to split leadership responsibilities, our synergy as a full group wasn’t there and the team dissolved after only a couple months. At this point I knew I wasn’t cut out for captaining a team in any fashion and needed a break to reset a bit. It was painful watching both a lack of boundaries with my first team and having them disrespected by some on my second both lead to their downfall, so I needed to understand what it was like being a free agent for a while and figure out what I wanted from comp.
Come September of 2025, I had begun wrestling with the idea of emulating a team structure in many other games - dedicated support staff alongside the actual roster of players. I had put out a post looking to join a team with no responses, so I was dejected at the idea that my weapon pool was unappealing to most teams. Creating another team from scratch felt like the only real path forward if I wanted to keep playing Wellstring and Heavy Edit, but that would be a monumental task to take on yet again. And I knew I couldn’t be captain again, so this would not only be a great endeavor but experimental as well.
After Glack agreed to come on as team manager, we worked to find a coach before starting recruitment on the actual roster and that was messy. Trying out a coach without the players is a bit like putting the cart before the horse - how will the coach get along with players who don’t yet exist? With some scrims and mock VOD reviews to actually do tryouts, we found Shark and finally had the bedrock for recruitment. And in the following months we would pick up Agaric and Hax, with Renzo begrudgingly admitting that him offering to sub for us over and over started to look a lot like him joining the team. The experiment worked, we had support staff dedicated to the team’s improvement and willing players wanting to push as far as they could.
Our first year as a team hasn’t been linear progress, there have been some challenges along the way along with our own lives taking precedent over practice. But we’ve forged such incredible friendships and everyone has been so supportive of each other. As someone who faces a lot of mental health struggles and past struggles in Splatoon team environments, it’s been a breath of fresh air for everyone to be so kind to me. I genuinely couldn’t ask for a better group of people to call my teammates and friends. Riptide this year was the culmination of this sentiment, with all of us getting to meet together in person for the first time. I finally understood sobbing at the airport saying goodbye to people.
And that brings us to now, as we look for our final member to round out the roster and help make our practice more consistent. I’m glad to have salvaged such great branding from the first attempt at the team, gotten the people I wanted most to join onto the team, and found such amazing friends. It was a massive undertaking to take this path over just joining another team on weapons I didn’t enjoy, but the result was worth it.
Also it turns out we’re kinda good at the game too? Despite all the breaks and inconsistency in practice as we take the time we need in our own lives, we’ve been steadily improving. So not only are we a super cool group of friends, we’re also your next bracket demon!
Here’s to year 2 and beyond!