Welcome to NEO Roller Derby’s new blog. To start this off, is our experience at our first tournament, way back in May: BrewHaHa written by our own Taking Names
The weekend of May 21st found NEO in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at Midwest BrewHaHa. No, it’s not a beer festival (although we derby girls do love our beer). It’s the Brewcity Bruisers’ second annual tournament which housed 2 tracks and 20 leagues ready to battle it out for that coveted win.
BrewHaHa isn’t a tournament where 1 winner takes all, like many of you would imagine when you hear the word tournament. For you derby enthusiasts who are obsessed like I am, you know what the deal is, but let me take a moment to break it down for our less seasoned fans. Currently there are five WFTDA (Women’s Flat Track Derby Association) tournaments that happen annually in the fall, these are known as the Big 5. There is one held in each region; west, north central, south central and east, these are known as Regionals. Those tournaments consist of the 10 top ranked teams in each region going skate to skate for a slot to go to Championships. Only the top three teams from each tournament qualify for Championships. Championships is where one winner takes all and is dubbed the #1 ranked team! Prior to Regionals, WFTDA leagues play each other in sanctioned bouts fighting for a chance to improve their rankings in the hopes of making it to Regionals. Since all WFTDA leagues are “by the skaters for the skaters” and traveling is so expensive, leagues will host tournaments such as BrewHaHa to give teams the opportunity to play more bouts giving them more bang for their buck. That, plus it’s just a bad ass experience to have a weekend full of Roller Derby!
So now that we are all on the same page, lets get back to NEO and our first ever tournament. It truly was an amazing experience and a monumental step for us. Being a brand new member of WFTDA, we have a long way to go if we ever want to see play time at the Big 5 tournaments. In addition to being the new kid on the block, we lost our first 2 WFTDA sanctioned bouts to Paper Valley and Burning River putting us at a 0-2. Needless to say, we were coming in as an underdog.
Our first bout had us going head to head with the Fox City Foxz Scream Puffs, from Appleton Wisconsin. We didn’t know a whole lot about the Scream Puffs aside from the fact they too are newer to WFTDA and we really needed a win. And win we did! It was a nail biter of a bout with the Scream Puffs trailing us most of it, but never by more than one good power jam’s worth of points. Those girls weren’t going anywhere without a fight and had us sweating in our knee socks the entire time. Alas for the Puffs they fell just short and we took the win 124 - 105.
We were no strangers to the second team we played. The Hammer City Roller Girls from Hamilton, Ontario was our final bout of our first season back in 2008. We hammered them pretty good back then with a final score of 174 - 27, but a lot can change in three years. Hammer City has more time under their belt being a WFTDA league and is currently ranked at 19 in the North Central region, so we honestly had no clue what to expect. Fortunately for us we had an opportunity to scope them out when they played the Burning River Roller Girls All Stars. The knowledge we gained from watching them and the determination we had to leave Wisconsin with 2 wins was no match for Hammer City and we won 124 - 48. Our Canadian sisters to the north fought tooth and nail until the end, but they just couldn’t hammer us down.
Leaving BrewHaHa with 2 wins had us feeling on top of the world. We didn’t think we could get any higher until we checked out flattrackstats.com. There we were, on the top of the page! Not only did Flat Track Stats highlight us as the biggest tournament “movers” for having moved up 54 notches according to their rankings (completely separate from WFTDA rankings) but they also said our 2 bouts were the biggest upsets! The underdogs prevailed and we are thirsty for more.
