Welcome to this year’s final edition of The Circuit. Even though we’ve only been at it for two blocks, reporting on intramurals has been a great joy for us this spring. Accordingly, we are just this once allowing ourselves the joy of being more than a little bit subjective as we tell you about our predictions for the winners in lieu of the ability to time-travel and report on which teams actually took home the shirts.
Softball:
Despite the rain delays, softball will be wrapping up this week, with the losers’ bracket final and the championship final both scheduled for Thursday. Lilly and Anya agree that the championship faceoff will likely be between both hockey teams (baby hockey and adult hockey).
Historically, the upperclassmen team has had no problem sweeping the floor with their younger counterparts. We have no reason to believe that this game will be any different, especially considering their team-carrying female players (us) are ready to bring their A-game: between writing this column, studying for finals and the impending weekend, we’re both behind on laundry and could really use the extra shirt. So our mutual prediction for softball is that Big Sticks (adult) will come out on top.
Soccer:
This week marked the start of the playoff rounds of the Block 8 tournament. The four-team pool play has ended and gained popularity, and now it’s down to the top teams.
Veteran team Senior 18 is ready for a potential comeback from their brutal loss in futsal to the freshman Boonies. But do they have what it takes?
“I think if we keep playing die before each game for team bonding, we’re gonna be golden,” said player Mea Allex ‘26. And hey, if it works, it works. Maybe that was the reason they weren’t winning in the winter. They needed the sun, the table and maybe a few cans.
Another team is the club soccer and varsity swim team, Max McHugh, who has been showing up and showing out with their fans at each game. Named after their former assistant coach, captain Stephen Kim ‘28 claims that their strategy is to concentrate within.
“We’re not really focusing on the other teams; we’re just focusing on being the hardest squad to play against. It’s all about trust and timing. I can’t give away the full game plan just yet, but if we pull it off, it’s going to be a fun story.”
And a fun story, indeed.
While the freshman Boonies have been continuing their winning streak through pool play and even the quarterfinals, we might add, narrowly, they never responded to questions about what it will take for their team to win. Is it cockiness or the trials of the end of the year? Certainly can’t be the latter.
The Pookies are out. We need to just rip the painful band-aid off and admit it ourselves. Our legacy (one shirt) has not carried over into our junior year. So with that, we must have another dog in the fight… and we have an underdog. Despite a very fruitless highlight reel, starring yours truly, we’ve decided that to uphold our fun, lighthearted and IM-dedicated idea of The Circuit, Sand Jobs should take the shirt.
“It’s gonna be tough to beat Boonies and Senior 18. I think continuing to build chemistry with our new recruits and being strategic about our game plan and substitutions will help us advance,” said player Darren Gould ‘29.
But tough doesn’t mean impossible, and Sand Jobs have some tricks up their sleeves.
“Parking the bus vs Bunda Liga helped us seal the win. We parked the bus for the last 10 minutes,” said Gould.
A term coined by coach Jose Mourinho during his mid-to-late 2000s Chelsea stint, it essentially means playing extremely defensively. This tactic has become fashionable with teams like Juventus, AC Milan and even Atletico Madrid following suit. As we all know, offense wins games, defense wins championships.
Should another freshman team win a shirt? No. But: Should any of the other teams win a shirt over the team that has had a roster for almost every IM this year? Also no. So, alas, Sand Jobs, you have not only our prediction but also our sincerest hope and good luck.
Grass Volleyball:
For many, Sunday is a day of rest. For the Colorado College intramural athlete, rest is not in the vocabulary, especially when the Block 8 grass volleyball tournament comes around. This year, the series of single-day tournaments, normally played on Second Saturdays, ended with a strong field of 17 teams.
Among them was the soon-to-be champions, Grass Fed, whose story is a testament to the fact that intramural wins don’t come easy. Aidan Landers ‘24 went into the weekend with every intention of not only competing in the tournament, but truly representing the athletic prowess of Math Econ majors from the Bay Area (not biased). Unfortunately, the world had other plans for both his ankle and his original roster.
“I ended up getting injured on Saturday playing grass volleyball at [Colorado State University], and Liko’s team sort of fell apart too, so we ended up merging teams with him,” Landers told The Catalyst. Liko Acoba is a player on the men’s club volleyball team who has been on the winning IM indoor volleyball team for the past two years.
While unable to channel the extra practice into the tournament on Sunday, Landers still showed up to support the franken-team, bringing a new perspective after taking in the recreational sport culture at our often-mistaken-for neighbor up in Fort Collins.
“There were a lot of good teams, but the turnout at CC was like, honestly, pretty awesome comparatively cause, I mean, it’s such a small school. I’d say we had like two thirds of the turnout at CC,” said Landers. CSU has over ten times the student body of CC.
After six hours of gameplay, which left players and spectators alike with comically intense sunburns, Grass Fed found themselves in the finals, where Landers and Acoba faced a team led by teammate Beckett Alper. It became clear that neither team was going down without a fight.
“Beckett was sort of just getting kill after kill,” Landers recounted. “It was sort of like if he got set it was just going to be a point for them, so I wasn’t feeling super optimistic, honestly, when it came down to like 14-14.”
The games were played to 15 and required a team to win by two points. For Landers’ team, which had battled injuries and ankle rolls, victory was finally within reach. “Elliot [Rubin] blocked [Beckett], and then Liko blocked him for the game point and we hadn’t really gotten any blocks the whole game, so that was pretty awesome.”
With two blocks, Grass Fed settled the beef and was crowned the Second Sunday’s grass volleyball champions, a beautiful conclusion to the beloved series.
Final Remarks:
And just like that, the 2025-26 school year is coming to an end. “I think it was a solid year. I was most pleased with the second Saturday,” said Chris Starr, Director of Campus Recreation. “I think we have a solid six sports, we need to find two more,” she said, hinting at her goal of replacing the consistently neglected Campus Golf tournament that rarely draws more than a few participants. People may have been deterred from golf due to a particular incident involving a 6-iron and a forehead in the fall of 2023. The perpetrator of the accidental violence was unavailable to comment because they (Anya) were too busy writing this article.
This year, Campus Rec replaced the classic 3v3 soccer tournament with a hamster ball soccer tournament, in which players are surrounded by a massive inflatable orb. Starr considered this tournament a huge success, both for its entertainment factor, as well as the fact that it drew a diverse crowd outside of just the regular IMers, and she is more than open to suggestions for how to fill the remaining two blocks instead of repeating the pickleball tournament twice. Our ideas include soap hockey (a club hockey signature event), capture the flag, paintball, World Cup soccer and Catalan human tower.
The end of the school year also means that many of IM’s most familiar faces will be leaving us. Starr mentioned one particular IM athlete who she felt deserved special recognition due to her contributions both on the field, on the sideline as a referee and supervisor of various intramurals: “Mea. She’s really stepped up as a supervisor and a good leader,” Starr said.
Mea Allex is a senior from New Jersey. She originally came to CC as a Division I soccer player, finding her true calling as a club and intramural athlete shortly thereafter. Her finesse on the field has helped her team, Senior 18, become the winningest franchise in recent IM soccer/futsal history. She graciously lends her tenacious spirit to intramural ping pong, softball and many Second Saturday tournaments, where she assumes the role of fearless supervisor. If we’d started this column earlier, Allex would surely have earned an Intramural Athlete of the Week by now, but it’s better late than never that we bestow upon her this award, which will surely be the most important one that she receives this month. Congrats, Mea, and to all of the seniors who have enlivened intramural sports in your time here, you’re certainly leaving some big shoes to fill!
For the rest of you: As you battle the weekend hangover to pack up your rooms by Wednesday, we hope you don’t bury your cleats too deep in your boxes, that you send a proper farewell text to your IM Group-mes and that if you were lucky enough to win a shirt this year, that you wear it with pride all summer. We can’t wait to see you and score many goals and home runs against you all next year!