Article by Austin Pace
HERRIMAN, UT – Two of the UFA’s top contenders are going head-to-head in the West, with one final shot at punching their ticket to Championship weekend.
The Salt Lake City Shred will host the Oakland Spiders this Saturday in the West Division Championships. It’s a rematch loaded with tension, history and extremely high stakes. For Salt Lake, it’s a chance to redeem last year’s heartbreak. For Oakland, it’s a shot at revenge after falling short twice during the regular season.
Last year, the Shred came within reach of the league’s biggest stage but were eliminated by Seattle in the division title game. That offseason, major roster turnover meant half of the team was brand new heading into 2025.
“Half of our roster was new,” said Shred Head Coach Bryce Merrill. “There was a lot of really exciting things during preseason camp, and they were able to talk and build through some discussions that plagued us the season before that that we could feel like we were putting each of our athletes in a position to succeed this year.”
That mindset paid off. After suffering a season opening loss to Atlanta, the Shred bounced back in dominant fashion – winning 11 straight games and taking the number one spot in the West Division. They ended the regular season second overall in scores per game, o-line conversion rate and turnovers per game. The young team came out strong, and a lot of their success can be attributed to their mentality going into every practice.
“When we come to practice, we are focused and we are locked into what we want to accomplish as a team,” said Defensive Handler/Cutter Benjamin Ashton. “Those practices make us better and really help us out in those gritty games where we have to claw back. The practices really stuck out to me this year.”
One major change to practices this year was the introduction of a performance-based competition system inspired by the ELO algorithm – commonly used in chess and adopted by college ultimate powerhouse Brown University.
“They used the ELO algorithm that chess uses to build competition,” Merrill said. "What we did was we essentially created up to 15 scored scrimmages on our Monday practices. If you won a game, you stole points from the players who lost, and their aggregate averages would change. We’d then input it into the algorithm, and it would build us a real time winners and losers bracket.”
The algorithm created a clutch mentality for each of the players and helped them improve their mindset of practicing like it was game time. The coaching staff then tied a certain number of roster spots.
“Regardless of what our positional needs were, regardless of what the coaches thought, we just put them on the roster,” Merrill said. “They earned it. And it just made the early season practices really fun for the athletes and be really competitive.”
That edge showed when Salt Lake pulled off one of their most impressive wins of the year, an overtime thriller in Oakland. The Shred, despite trailing 23-21 with 54 seconds left, stormed back to win 25-24 in overtime in Oakland.
“We were down the entire game, and we were able to bring it back and push it to overtime and then we really took control of the game and overtime and won,” said Defensive Handler Oscar Brown. “I think that moment right there we proved ourselves that in any sort of adversity we can battle through it and push to the next level.”
Shred swept the regular season series with both Oakland and Colorado, giving players like Ashton the confidence and hope that they have what it takes to go all the way to championship weekend.
“I think those wins are really the ones that make us realize that yes, we can win a championship, and we can compete, and we can be gritty and compete against the best and win against the best,” Ashton said.
Still, the playoff rematch with Oakland is no guarantee. The Spiders are coming off a dominant performance against Colorado, tallying 17 blocks and giving up only one break the entire game. Statistically, they sit right behind Salt Lake in offensive metrics, coming in third in o-line conversion and hold rate.
Even so, team leadership remains confident.
“Even though we beat them in the regular season and even though I think we will win, it’ll be a really exciting and really close game,” said Isaac Pritchett, one of the owners of Salt Lake Shred. “We are a really strong team, and I think we’re really fast and so far, no one has proven that they can run with us for four quarters.”
That confidence is echoed by the coaching staff as well.
“We’ve made our bed. We’ve done all the work,” Merrill said. “We have done it in a way that does give us the expectation of success and a high probability of success. We came here to win, and so we’re going to do that.”
While the game plan includes some Spider-specific strategy, Ashton says the focus remain internal.
“We are game planning a little bit, but it’s not the main focus of our practice,” Ashton said. “The main focus of our practices is making sure we have our own system down where we can focus on our stuff and do our stuff well. Then no matter what they throw at us, we’re ready to just run our system and play our game.”
Only one team will advance to Championship Weekend. The other will see their season end in heartbreak. Shred fans know that feeling all too well and are hoping history doesn’t repeat itself.
Now in its fourth season as a franchise, the Salt Lake Shred has never been closer to bringing a UFA title back home to Utah.
