Note: Go Go Berserk! of the Quad City Rollers gives us a scene report from the bout in Indianapolis on May 1. She is the author of this piece.
Forum at Fishers is an ice skating facility. Interestingly enough when the ice is gone it leaves a great surface for a roller derby bout. However on May 1 when the Quad City Rollers traveled there to play in a bout vs. Circle City , ice couldn’t have been more desired. The garage door in the back was open but still the air remained very warm, heavy and still.
Each team was given a half an hour of practice time during the afternoon before the bout. I gotta give thanks to CCS for that. Can’t say we’ve ever been given that much time to make adjustments to a new floor before.
It was with a bit of heavy heart that my team took to the track that day. Even though we tapped into a couple of alternates to play this bout we had to go in with only 11 girls rather than 14. Several of our teammates had very difficult personal things, of which I won’t go into here, come up in the weeks and even days before this bout. When you know your derby sisters are going through something very tough off the track it is hard not to notice their absence. The remaining 11 would take the floor with all the heart we had. You just have to take the attitude that you are going to play your tail off for those that could not be there with you. We may have lost by a wide margin in the end but I still stand by that we gave it a hell of a go.
About 3-4 jams into the bout I joined El Efino in the pack when we realized that we had not yet done our pre-bout slap. If you’ve seen “Blood on the Flat Track” then you’ve seen this before. I’ll admit to shamelessly steeling this idea from the Rat City Rollers. Before a bout I’m generally quite happy: happy that it’s bout day and happy to be playing in this amazing sport. I’ve found that in fact I am possibly too happy and need a bit of a leveler to get my head into the game quicker and fuel my fire. So there we were lining up in the front of the pack giving each other a good slap in the face before the start of the jam!
The first period was close and exciting throughout and gave the impression that it was really anybody’s game as the lead went back & forth. If I recall we were down by the end of the first half but certainly not out at that point.
Second period we found ourselves in lots more penalty trouble than we could reasonably recover from and of course then the Circle City lead ran out of our reach. Still we had plenty of moments to be really proud of such as our team’s growing ability to cycle blockers on an opposing jammer. I recall one particular jam where our girls did this so well that the CCS jammer didn’t make it out of the pack to approach a scoring pass until very near the end of the jam.
Sugar N’ Slice was awarded best jammer and Mexican Monster best blocker for the night. We really appreciated this recognition but for any of us who practice regularly with these two…preachin’ to the choir! (Haha) We had a great time in Indianapolis and hope for a rematch one day with the fine ladies of the Circle City Socialites.
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