Grid League 2026 – Wolves vs Brigade: Brigade’s Experience Holds Off New York’s Debut, 21-16

By the time the Sprint Relay started, the Tampa Bay Brigade had thrown challenge flags that went both ways, sat through two reruns, and watched a rookie-loaded debut team refuse to go away. Veteran teams are supposed to make nights like this boring. This one was anything but, and the Brigade won it anyway.

Tampa Bay beat the New York Wolves 21-16 in Lakeland, closing out one of the most chaotic matches of the young season in the final race. The Brigade needed the win, and the standings do not care how close the losses that came before it were.

A debut team that would not break

Grid is coed, head-to-head team racing. Two teams run a series of separate contests on parallel lanes of a playing surface called the Grid, four quadrants long and getting harder the deeper you go. A race win is worth two points, a finish inside the time cap is worth one, and the team with more points takes the match. The Brigade have been doing this for years. The Wolves had never done it at all, with one exception: New York captain Mike Rosa, who wore Brigade colors last season.

Tampa Bay set the tone in the opening Partner Four, the devil’s press race that stacks burpees under overhead dumbbell presses. Christopher Cioffi and owner-coach-player Jess Krezmien, two of the fastest burpee racers in the league, opened a lead the Wolves could only chase.

The Mirror is where the Brigade’s institutional knowledge first paid off. In that barbell race the bar cannot touch the ground once lifted, and when a referee faulted a Tampa Bay lifter in the fourth quadrant, coach Tomas Basin, a former head judge, threw the challenge flag and won it. The footage showed his man had banked an extra rep. The race reran, and although New York eventually took it, the Brigade had shown they were going to contest every inch.

Then they went to work where veterans win. Cioffi, last season’s bodyweight specialist of the year, and Marissa Oxenford powered both Echo races, the gauntlet that runs twice 45 seconds apart and punishes thin rosters. Tampa Bay swept them and led 9-6.

There’s a lot of things that happen in a grid match that we just can’t control. So it’s just a matter of re-centering ourselves, re-grounding ourselves, and just trusting our training and the work that we’ve put in.

Jocelyn Williams, Tampa Bay Brigade

Bonus flags, reruns, and an inactive-player zero

The Brigade’s sharpest call came on the Jack and Jill, the bodyweight specialists’ showcase. They threw a bonus flag, the gamble that bumps a win from two points to three, like a football team deciding to go for two. Cioffi and Garrison Matthews delivered, and the three points pushed the lead to 14-11.

Not every break went their way. The Brigade lost the second Ringer Point when rookie Sydney Pawlak outran Arianna Durrum to the line, and a flooring challenge on that duel went against them. The Female Triad hurt more. Tampa Bay had taken it on the Grid, but a kettlebell fault forced a rerun of the last two elements, and an inactive player on the rerun drew an automatic zero that wiped the points off the board.

The men answered. Dan Tai, Angel Serrano, and Matthews took the Male Triad clean to restore the cushion at 16-13.

The ejection that reset the math

The Fan-Voted Ringer went to New York’s Steven Cupec over Isabella Carvalho on the kettlebell clusters the fans had voted in. The Brigade challenged it, arguing Cupec’s wraps were illegally looped around the handle. They were right, and the penalty ejected Cupec for the rest of the match. The result stood, so New York kept the point, but Tampa Bay had just removed one of the Wolves’ best players from the race that decides matches.

It mattered. New York threw a bonus flag on the Sprint Relay to make the closing race worth four, needing it to steal the match. But the Brigade had the depth and the reps, and they did not flinch. Dalton Herrero, as good a rope climber as there is in the league, capitalized on a New York no-rep and Tampa Bay never gave the lead back. The Brigade took the Sprint Relay, the bonus that came with it, and the match, 21-16.

It was not clean and it was not comfortable. For a team that needed a statement win to steady its season, it counted all the same.

Race-by-race results

The Brigade are the official Tampa Bay team of the United Grid League

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