Saturday, January 21st found NEO Roller Derby in Fort Wayne, IN at our very first bout of the season, against the Fort Wayne Derby Girls. Audio Assault (AA) and the Rock ‘n’ Roller Girls (RnR) made the trek to the beautiful Allen County War Memorial Coliseum for a double header.
The first bout of the night was Audio Assault taking on the girls of S.W.A.T. AA looked great in their purple jerseys and fought tooth and nail, unfortunately is wasn’t enough to forge off S.W.A.T. who has several veteran skaters on their team. Final score AA 60 – S.W.A.T. 193.
The second match up between the Rock ‘n’ Roller Girls and FWDG’s Bomb Squad was a long anticipated one by the girls of RnR. We’ve skated against S.W.A.T., before we were members of the WFTDA (Women’s Flat Track Derby Association), but this was our first sanctioned game against the Bomb Squad. We were super excited to skate against them. However, we found ourselves outmatched, final score NEO 80 – Bomb Squad 204.
This may sound like a pretty big loss, but we actually did pretty well. Coming into the night, Flat Track Stats www.flattrackstats.com had RnR losing at a margin of 8 points to every 33 scored by the Bomb Squad. Fort Wayne scored a ratio of 20:8. This is 126 game points short of the expected ratio of 33:8. Even though we lost the bout, we did better than what was anticipated, actually moving up 11.5 points taking us from 99th place to 94th. Fort Wayne ranked 48th before the bout, dropped to 51st. Considering we were playing with a very short roster and against a very tough competitor who is ranked significantly higher than us, we are very proud of ourselves and had a great time in Fort Wayne.
The next bout for Audio Assault is February 4th & 5th in Bloomington, IN, where they will participate in their first tournament, The B-Cup. It’s sure to be an exciting weekend with lots of thrills and spills. Rock ‘n’ Roller Girls will be taking on sister league, Little Steel Derby Girls in a closed bout on February 11th.
