Grid League 2026 – Palms vs Bandits: Bandits Take Their First Win 19-18

Match Report · 2026 Season

Miami · May 23, 2026

The stream dropped mid-match. Part 2 picks up at the male triad and runs through the finish.

The Houston Bandits had never won a Grid League match. Two seasons of close calls ended in Miami on May 23, and it took nearly everything in the rulebook to get there: a coach’s challenge, a rerun of the final race, a bonus flag thrown in advance, and a super wild card who had not been on the Grid in years.

The Bandits beat the South Beach Palms 19-18 at the Miami International Fitness Expo in the second match of the 2026 season’s opening day. They trailed for most of it.

A first half of inches

The Palms took the opening partner four race, and Houston answered at the line in the Mirror, the barbell race where the bar can never touch the ground. Tyler Davis walked the Palms’ bar into the final quadrant before all of his teammates were inside it, the reps stopped counting, and the Bandits took a race the Palms had all but finished.

Heather Hudson beat Sammy Bellot in the first ringer point, a one-on-one duel that this time was deficit handstand push-ups, eight reps for her against ten for him. The Palms then swept both runnings of the Echo, the race performed twice with 45 seconds of rest, while Houston banked the within-cap point each time.

The ladder came down to a single point, 67-66 Houston. In the strength race where players alternate down the Grid lifting heavier bars, the Palms attempted more of the heaviest ones and missed; the Bandits hit what they went for, and rookie Ellia Miller cleared all four bars in her Grid debut. Mason Belk followed it by outrunning rookie Megan Davis in the farmer carry ringer with 215 pounds in each hand. At halfway it was 11-10 Palms.

The Palms pull away

South Beach swept Jack and Jill and both triads behind the deepest roster coach Bryleigh Hansen has ever fielded. At 17-13 with two races left, Houston needed everything to fall right. Coach, owner, and utility player Sophia Davenport kept the message plain after the triads: keep your head strong, smooth steady reps, hit your marks, and let the coaches worry about the rest.

Nine wall balls and a review

The fans voted for tall wall balls in the new fan-voted ringer point, and both teams sent height: Lauren Olson against Artur Cabral, the tallest player in the league, nine reps each to a 12-foot target for him and 11 feet for her.

“In the past we’ve kind of been known to botch it. So, showing the world that we won’t botch a sprint relay today.”
Bandits strength specialist Lauren Olson, before the fan-voted ringer

Olson finished first in 20.41 seconds.

Then the review came back on Cabral: eight completed reps of nine, one of them a no-rep. The Palms took a zero, and a four-point lead was suddenly two.

The finish, twice

Davenport threw the Bandits’ bonus flag before the Sprint Relay even started, the first one thrown in the league this season. The flag adds an extra point to a race win, and the math demanded it: winning the relay without it would have left the match tied 18-18 and headed to a gridlock tiebreaker.

The first running looked like more Houston heartbreak. Oscar Martel appeared stuck on the backward rolls to support, the Palms finished, and the celebration started on the wrong sideline. Then Davenport challenged. The review showed Martel had completed all four required reps and a referee had asked him for a fifth. The ruling: rerun the final four elements, two men and two women per team.

Davenport spent her other card too, burning the season’s only super wild card on Josh Rundall, a veteran of the league’s original Gainesville days, specifically to handle the backward rolls. He handled them clean. An early-start flag set the Palms back, and the last element came down to Belk against Palms rookie Clark Lawson on 25 thrusters. Belk, who had played nearly every race of the match, finished first, hit the four-point touch behind the start line, and sprinted Houston into the first win in franchise history.

The Palms challenged the thruster lockouts after the match. The review upheld every rep. Final: Bandits 19, Palms 18.

Belk told the broadcast desk before the match that this was what he came here for, and he closed both runnings of the relay to prove it. Houston did it without John Young and Matt Rattay, two of their biggest strength pieces. Davenport’s answer for what comes next was as plain as her mid-match advice: two weeks of practice, then back at it in Lakeland.

Race-by-race results

Race	Palms	Bandits	Running score
Partner Four	2:46.12	2:54.13	2-1
Mirror	1:28.88	1:24.54	3-3
Ringer Point 1 (deficit handstand push-ups)	:20.08	:21.87	5-4
Echo 1	3:08.25	3:21.24	7-5
Echo 2	3:05.25	3:33.97	9-6
Ladder	66	67	10-8
Ringer Point 2 (farmer carry)	:9.47	:8.96	11-10
Jack and Jill	2:11.72	2:26.90	13-11
Female Triad	2:56.82	3:34.19	15-12
Male Triad	2:55.03	3:10.28	17-13
Fan-Voted Ringer (tall wall balls)	DNF	:20.41	17-15
Sprint Relay (rerun, Bandits +1 bonus flag)	2:21.13	2:17.19	18-19 Final

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