Event Overview

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. The mainline East Coast Stamina tournaments are traditionally a live event, but ECS14 will be held remotely.

ECS14 features an upper division, mid division, and lower division (as well as a special, separate speed division); if you wish to compete, you'll need to have participated in the Stamina RPG 9 qualifiers. Placement into Upper Division and Mid Division is dependent upon your points for qualifying (TP + LP).

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:

Format Info

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. The ".5" events starting from ECS4.5 have added team play as an aspect of the format, but the mainline ECS tournaments-- the whole number ones-- 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 event is available here:

Score Submission

If you qualified, you can enter scores any time between 2025/10/13 and 11:59 PM EST on 2025/10/29 (dates tentative).

Score submission will open once the event begins.

Remote Competition

This year's event is a remote competition. You can download what you need here:

Supporting ECS/SRPG

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 SRPG9 and ECS14) 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

When I started running these tournaments, I handled almost all of the work by myself. In ECS3, Zaia and @@ were the first to join the team when they helped with stepping the marathon that year, and things have grown from there in terms of collaboration-- and I really appreciate all the assistance I now get in trying to make all of this possible.

To start, I'd like to thank everyone who has contributed monetarily by either purchasing merchandise or making a direct donation. Art, original music compositions, marathon mixes, the .5 prizes, and the live events all cost a considerable amount of money, so anything you guys do to help make that hurt less is a huge help (though I never realistically expect I'll be able to fully recoup those expenses). Here's a partial list of those people (this just includes everyone who donated through the RPG site and properly followed the link back to get the Godfather's Token relic):

  • DanPeriod
  • titandude21
  • Nebel
  • Franksoua
  • Archi
  • Xynn
  • Janus5k
  • Telperion
  • teejusb
  • antipathetique
  • Sereni
  • arol
  • PkGam
  • Nato
  • JWong
  • hk
  • Huell Babineaux...
  • Roujo
  • SirDelins
  • LFK
  • Cyx
  • NinjaNabi
  • Amoo
  • Zylos
  • Fanatik25
  • maru
  • kevinnnn
  • Ducky

  • Large thank you to teejusb for bringing VA-11 HALL-A alive in theme form!
  • Rems did an amazing job with the marathon mixes once again this year!
  • Thanks to my Lower Division marathon stepartists: Archi (hey that's me), Rems, @@, Chief Skittles, and Janus5k! Appreciate you guys helping me bring this one to life!
  • Thanks to my Mid Division marathon stepartists: Xynn, Tuuc, Kyy, SirDelins, and zaniel! You managed to pull it off despite all the torsion!
  • Thanks to my Upper Division marathon stepartists: JWong, Levitas, and Zaia! You did it!
  • Xynn did the sync check for all three marathons! You won't take my money, so at least take my thanks!
  • Upper and Speed division handled by Levitas. Rest in pizza. For a couple months. Sorry, no pepperonis.
  • Pluto did the cool art! Yay! Thanks!
  • quietly-turning made the original ECS theme that was used back in ECS7, which we've iterated upon in the years since. Thank you for that!
  • Credit to Rawinput wrote the original score automation script back for ECS7. It was the original basis for a lot of what I've done to parse submissions in all the events afterwards. Thanks man!
  • To all the stepartists who are featured in the tournament: You're all awesome! Thanks for contributing to making stamina so fun year after year!
  • Everyone who helped with SRPG but wasn't mentioned above-- thanks for everything! Let's make next year great too!
  • ...and finally, to everyone who continues to participate in my events: Thank you for playing!
-- Ian