Alamo AFCEA Capture The Flag 2025 — 3rd place
LoboSec placed 3rd in the college and university division of the Alamo AFCEA Capture The Flag, held Wednesday, December 3, 2025 at the JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country Resort & Spa. The event was hosted by the Alamo AFCEA STEM Education Foundation and sponsored by Parsons, and ran as three separate divisions across three days — middle and high school, college and university, then military and industry.
Ours was the college day: six players, on-site, one four-hour window.
Final standings
The scoreboard stayed tight at the top all day. The three teams that broke away from the field:
| Place | Team | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | Knightsec | ~12,100 pts |
| 2nd | UTSA | ~12,000 pts |
| 3rd | LoboSec | ~11,600 pts |
Seven more teams filled out the top ten, most of them finishing between 7,000 and 10,500 points.
How the run went
We did not start fast. For the first forty-five minutes we were near the bottom of the top ten while Knightsec and UTSA built an early lead — they were both above 5,000 points before we cleared 4,000.
The turn came in the second hour. Between roughly 10:20 and 11:00 we went from about 7,500 to over 10,300 points, clearing a cluster of challenges in a single push and moving past six teams on the board. From there we held third place through the back half of the competition and closed the gap with the leaders to a few hundred points by the end.
Two things made that possible:
- Not spreading thin early. The slow start was partly deliberate — people were reading the whole board and picking chains they could actually finish rather than racing for cheap solves.
- Handing off cleanly. When someone stalled, a teammate picked the challenge up with the notes already written down. That's the practice habit paying off in the only place it counts.
What we'd fix
The first hour is the honest weak spot. The leaders converted early challenges much faster than we did, and in a four-hour format you rarely get that time back — we came within a few hundred points of first place while giving away most of the opening hour. Faster triage on the easy tier is the thing to drill before the next on-site event.
Third place in our first Alamo AFCEA showing, against a field of university teams, on a four-hour clock. We'll take it — and we know exactly where the missing points were.
Next year
The Alamo AFCEA CTF is now on our calendar as a fixture. If you want to be on the roster for the next one, join the Discord — rosters are open to every member, including people solving their first challenge.