The Vancouver Whitecaps beat the Colorado Rapids…in Connect Four

With most U.S. sports events canceled, there hasn’t been a lot for team Twitter accounts to talk about. There have been some useful posts on food donations from canceled events and financial support for event staffers, but there certainly haven’t been a lot of the usual game updates. But on Saturday, MLS’ Vancouver Whitecaps and Colorado Rapids decided to play out their suspended “match” in an interesting fashion; a Twitter game of Connect Four. The Whitecaps sent the initial challenge, but both sides got quite into it, even using their usual match hashtags, reaction GIFs, and more:

In the end, the Whitecaps came out with the victory. This play gave them two diagonal lines of three that could be extended to four, and the Rapids couldn’t block both.

And the Whitecaps were appropriately exuberant:

As were their fans:

pic.twitter.com/3HUQQQUA0k

— T. MÜLLER STAN (17-4-4)(37-28-5) (@contribute_ee) March 14, 2020

There have been some other team-on-team competitions in place of suspended or canceled events, including the NBA’s Phoenix Suns and Dallas Mavericks facing off in NBA 2K20 and some upcoming F1 and NASCAR virtual races, but this Whitecaps-Rapids “match” was fun as a cool thing for the social teams to do. And the teams kept it to one thread, so they hopefully didn’t deluge Twitter users who didn’t care, but Connect Four and the ability to show the board state move-by-move translated very well to Twitter and let those looking for some entertainment follow along. Perhaps we’ll see more board game competitions between teams down the road (there are lots of good free online options, even if they don’t all translate as easily to Twitter), or maybe we won’t, but we do appreciate the Whitecaps and Rapids providing some Twitter entertainment with this match Saturday.

[@WhitecapsFC on Twitter]