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“DePaul dodgeball is undefeated.”

This is the motto and the slogan that best showed the DePaul dodgeball’s mindset going into the Chicago Dodgeball Open tournament at the Ray Meyer Fitness and Recreation Center two weeks ago. But they technically aren’t actually undefeated.

The tournament featured a variety of different teams as close as the Moody Bible Institute, a few Brown Line stops away from DePaul, or as far as the University of Nebraska. Although DePaul dodgeball only won one game out of three, they are undefeated in that nobody has forced them to sacrifice their style.

“[The Open] was important because it was the one time a tournament took place in Chicago and it also gives us more chances to be goofy,” said Samuel Murphy, a member of DePaul dodgeball.

While most club practices are intense, DePaul’s team goofs around and laughs. Peter Gawron, another member of DePaul Dodgeball, gave the impression said the club translates that carefree attitude to their tournament play.

“We go to have fun, [rather than] to get a win,” Gawron said.

That’s not to say that every other team had the same mindset. Both Murphy and Gawron mentioned that Grand Valley State, the winner of the entire tourney, and a couple of other teams took the tournaments more seriously and came with clear-cut winning mentality. However, DePaul still played like they normally would.

“We won the first match and just did shenanigans,” Gawron said. “One of the matches, we went up to the other team and just dived. They were so confused, it was awesome.”

Murphy hinted that their “shenaningans” worked in their favor.

“It was a lot easier than it seemed to play those other teams, but we just wanted to make it fun,” Murphy said.

While fun was a major theme of the tournament, there were still high stakes. DePaul was tied with Moody for the Illinois Division going into the matches, which is important for the Nationals bracketing. The team will play Moody at the end of the month, so this was an important tournament to gain some standing ground.

In the end, DePaul’s record was 1-2 for the day. They might not have won many matches, but not even the Chicago Dodgeball Open could change DePaul’s happy-go-lucky attitude. So to put it in their words, this team is still undefeated.