What is East Coast Stamina?

East Coast Stamina (ECS) is a high level competition centered around a selection of some of the most difficult custom content available for In The Groove, a four-panel dance game similar to Dance Dance Revolution. It has been an annual tournament since September 2011, eventually becoming a biannual event starting with ECS2.5. East Coast Stamina 10 is a remote event this year, but it is normally a live event.

ECS10 features an upper division, mid division, and lower division; if you wish to compete, you'll need to have participated in the Stamina RPG 5 qualifiers, which are now over. Placement into Upper Division and Mid Division is dependent upon qualifier rank.

Current event standings can be found here:

There's also a page with a schedule and links for the Twitch streams of the various competitors (unfortunately this one isn't very mobile friendly, sorry). It is not mandatory to stream your set, or to schedule your stream-- adding yourself here totally up to you:

What is the format for ECS10?

Historically, the tournament has generally consisted of a "marathon" (a mix of songs usually roughly an hour in length), and then a timed set where players could choose songs from a preselected list, where the songs are assigned point values based on their difficulty in addition to the scores the players obtain on them. ECS4.5, ECS 5.5, ECS6.5, ECS7.5, ECS8.5 and ECS9.5 have added team play as an aspect of the format, but the mainline ECS tournaments-- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and this event, ECS10-- have all focused on each individual competing against the other entrants to achieve the highest score possible on the marathon, and also to gain as many points as possible in the timed set.

More information on the format is available here:

How/when do I compete?

If you qualified, you can enter scores any time between September 26th, 2021 and 11:59 PM EST on October 17th, 2021 (dates tentative).

Can I compete remotely?

Yes, in fact, there is no local competition this year due to the pandemic. There will only be remote competition this time. You can download what you need here:

How can I support SRPG/ECS?

Yeah, it costs a lot to run these events between paying for prizes, mailing said-prizes, paying for art, paying for music, paying for marathon syncing, paying for convention space for the live events, etc., and most of this comes out of my pocket. If you want to help out a little, an easy way is to buy shirts (or hats, or face masks, or whatever!). You can buy merch for various ECS and SRPG events (including SRPG5 and ECS10) at the Stamina Nation spreadshirt page:

If you just want to make a direct donation, you can use this link:

I really appreciate you guys helping out!

Acknowledgments

There's always a lot of people that I need to thank for helping make these events happen.

  • Teejusb has once again done a heavy lift to make this event possible from the theme-side of the equation. Thanks for everything you do, man!
  • On a related note, I want to once again acknowledge dbk2 for getting the theme-work off the ground way back in ECS7!
  • Rems needs some extra props this year for doing triple-marathon-mixing duty for ECS10. Thank you for all the amazing work you do!
  • I need to thank Rust and Janus5k for helping me step the lower marathon, zaniel and feedbacker for their work stepping the mid marathon, and Rems, Chief Skittles, StarrySergal, Zaia, and Levitas for handling the upper marathon! This is the largest group of people I've had to coordinate to step stuff for an individual ECS, so I appreciate everyone 'stepping' up.
  • Thank you to Pluto for all her work on the art for ECS10 and SRPG5-- as well as for completing the last remaining catch-up work for 7.5 and 8.5. Looking forward to getting those prizes shipped finally!
  • Thanks YourVinished for composing the music for the ECS10 theme and of course for the SRPG5 visual style for SL!
  • Dom is the man as usual for helping me get some of the web stuff set up. Thank you, my dude!
  • Rawinput needs credit for writing the original score automation script that I've further developed and used since ECS7. Appreciate all you've done and for finding time to participate and qualify despite how hectic your life has been this year!
  • To all the stepartists who wrote charts that were used in the event-- thank you! Once upon a time, there was a VERY limited amount of people creating content that was suitable for these tournaments, so I am extremely grateful to all of you for allowing me to shift my focus from creating charts to making the events better.
  • I would be remiss not to express my gratitude towards everyone that has donated or bought merchandise to help ECS and SRPG. Your support makes it more possible for me to run these events and pay the artists/musicians/etc. who contribute to these tournaments-- and that's not to mention, of course, that having funds in the war chest makes doing another live event considerably less of a strain on me, if we uh, ever get to do one again.
  • Everyone who helped with SRPG but wasn't mentioned above-- thank you! I think this was easily the best SRPG yet, and I hope it felt like as much of a step forward from SRPG4 as SRPG3 felt like from SRPG2.
  • ...and lastly, to everyone who continues to participate in my events: can you believe we've been doing this for ten years now? Thanks to all of you who at first tolerated but eventually came to love these events and the content in them like I do. Thanks for humoring my whims with the unorthodox formats I've run over the years. Thanks for being my friends in this space I've carved out.
-- Ian