Team Primary is one of the oldest teams in the Marble League, having been active since its inaugural season. That said, the team is newer compared to other teams that competed in tournaments years prior to the ML, such as the Balls of Chaos and the Fruit Circuit teams. The team grew up in Van Gotterdam, a city in Central Europe renowned as the art capital of the world. Prim and Mary, siblings, grew up in the city center. Their parents were art connoisseurs, and trained them to do the same. Prim and Mary attended the Van Gotterdam Academy of Art, the most prestigious art school in the world, and graduated with a B.S. in Art Restoration.

Rima grew up in Knikkegen, a city to the southeast, and was not interested in art in the slightest. Rima had a much different dream in life: to become a marble sports athlete. As a child, she watched as two brothers, Jelle and Dion Bakker, built up a regional marble league for fellow marbles to compete in. Once she aged into it, Rima competed and won in her first year. She competed the next year, and befriended Imar, the runner-up to her the previous year. That year, Imar won the KML in a photo-finish between Rima and Lightning, a future member of the Thunderbolts.

The KML went viral in a TV featurette about the growing popularity of marble sports tournaments around the world, with fans noting the high quality of the marble races produced by the Bakker brothers. In the next year, the KML received applications from around the world, most of which the Bakker brothers had to decline. Two of the applications it did accept, however, came from two siblings from Van Gotterdam.

“The featurette was everywhere we looked,” remembered Prim. “There were fans everywhere, in the museums, in the squares. Even my parents brought it up. There was an air of excitement around it that I never could have imagined.”

Mary added, “To be honest, until then, we’d only learned to appreciate and get excited about art. But the more we watched it, the more Prim and I saw that there was an art to marble sports. It was an art that inspired marbles to push themselves, to become the best versions of themselves.”

“We wanted to be a part of that,” Prim concluded.

Prim and Mary entered the 2014 Knikkegen Marble League with barely any training, but with that mindset, they attracted veterans to befriend them. Two of those veterans were Rima and Imar, and, later that year, they formed a team to compete in the tournament’s first team events. They chose the name “Team Primary” not just because of Prim and Mary’s studies in art, but because teamwork comes first. They placed in the top ten of the standings during their first year, and in 2015, dominated throughout the season to win the tournament.