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Competition between SPAR teams is common within a single unit as one team will pit its best operative against the member of another team in a TASC program to see who’s the best. It’s usually all in good fun, since SPAR teams within the same unit typically look out for each other and often congregate together to have a few drinks and talk about past operations, but competition between SPAR teams within different units is usually quite a different story. Every major city across the nation, of course, claims to have the best SPAR team within its unit, and in order to bring them all together and determine which city does have the best, each region hosts an annual competition between C-SWAT units, one on either coast. Each C-SWAT unit chooses its best SPAR team and sends its operatives to its respective coast for the competition.
For an entire week, SPAR teams are pitted against each other in a tough competition. Teams contest for points through a series of graded exercises that carry through the entire seven days to include various hostage rescues, target acquisition in multiple scenarios, rescuing a fallen comrade, multiple target encounters both with weapons and hand to hand, wilderness and urban survival tactics, urban combat and various others. At the end of the week, the four SPAR teams that received the highest scores are pitted against each other in a grueling 36-hour ‘war’. It covers an area of over 40 square miles of urban areas, woodlands, and desert. The team that comes out on top (decided by the number of team members still ‘alive’ and accounted for, and the number of apprehended or ‘killed’ enemy) receives a trophy for the best east coast or west coast SPAR team which they keep until the next year’s competition. Every two years, the four teams that won either of the coasts’ competitions come together to compete for a national trophy.
...And these boys play rough. They take these competitions very seriously and pull no punches to win. It’s not uncommon for an operative or two to come home with a broken arm or wrist and a couple of fractured ribs...
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