Last night in Lincoln , NE , two mighty warrior tribes locked in battle, only, unlike thunderdome, there were refs everywhere, whistling, pointing and just generally taking all of the fun out of anarchy. The Dames hit the taped track hard…and quickly fell down; the floor was as slippery as a greased-up catfish, but that made for some crazy fast skating and some mighty entertaining hits and dog piles.
In the first jam, the Roller Dames jumped out to a quick lead with Funsize scoring 15 unanswered points. Well, we were just so tickled with that early lead that we decided to celebrate by throwing some elbows, blocking out of bounds and tripping a few people. There was quickly a waiting list to get into the Dames’ penalty box, which allowed the Warriors to make up some ground, and then some. Between Dropkick Muffy, Crazy Cooter and Anna WrecksYa, the Road Warriors scored more than the cute janitor at the all-girl Catholic High School . By the halftime buzzer, the Warriors had 15 points on the Dames and we retired to the locker rooms with the score 63-48 (for those of you who don’t have a calculator handy, that’s a 30 point swing in less than 20 minutes).
The Dames regrouped. We all took off our naughty pants. Someone looked up “Strategy” with their Wikipedia app, and we were ready to go. We went back at it hard, keeping the pack fast and making the jammers work for every point. Of course, when the jammer is in the box, it’s pretty easy to keep them from scoring. Apparently we looked like we were having sooooo much fun in our penalty box, that the Road Warriors decided they’d all like to take a spin in their own box, and the refs were more than happy to oblige.
It was almost like there were three teams out there: Dames, Warriors and Refs. There were a total of seven officials, meaning that each skater had, an average of 1.4 eyeballs on them at any given time. Let me tell you, those 1.4 eyeballs didn’t miss a thing. The crowd had a really good hate going on and it was all pointed at the officials. All those screaming, belligerent derby fans were enough to make ref Kilgore Trout long for Lingo-Three, the planet of dying car-bots. The penalty officials could hardly keep up with the traffic in and out of the boxes; skaters were getting waved off from the full boxes, called back only to meet another player reporting to serve out their penalty. It was quite the, well, in order to keep the language here at a PG-13 rating, I’ll call it a frottage-barrage (look it up).
Almost everyone made at least one trip to the penalty box except, our own PBR. Mad props. I don’t mean to brag, but I committed my very first major penalty: tripping—please, please, hold your applause until all of the winners have been announced. Dames’ triple threat, Dubbs chucked a Road Warrior into the suicide seats in a Royal Rumble-style move, which, while fine in the pro wrestling world, is frowned upon in roller derby. Then, in a classic tiny vs. skinny clash, Funsize got all tangled up with Anna WrecksYa until they resembled a pretty two-headed spider on roller skates.
Road Warrior blocker, Hugs, whose name is very misleading, by the way, dominated the front of the pack, taking out Dames left and right, and, along with Celia Doom, Boom Boom Brooklyn and the rest of the Warrior’s blocking assassins, made the Dames’ jammers battle for every single point. But battle they did. The Dames played like we were still 15 points behind, and the next time we looked up, we were a jaw-dropping 72 points ahead. The score was 82-154 at the buzzer, giving the Roller Dames a W for the first bout of our season. I want to give a big THANK YOU to all of the No Coast Derby Girls for being great hosts, showing us an awesome time and playing a helluva good bout.
