Kalamazoo, MI

Tri-City Upsets Carolina

By Vile Love-it

In their first game after the narrow loss to Santa Cruz the night before, the Tri City Roller Girls (seed 8, ranked 60) from Kitchener, Ontario planned to make a statement on the track against the Carolina Rollergirls (seed 4, ranked 50) who hail from Raleigh, North Carolina.

“We came into the area leaving everything behind us from the previous day. Our focus was clear on the game ahead of us. We were focused but we had also decided that we were going to sing some songs during the game,” said Tri City Captain Sofanda Beatin’. “We wanted to be calm, cool and collected and have fun doing something we love to do.”

Carolina had already played Suburbia Roller Derby earlier in the day. According to Carolina’s Beth Row, though, they had specifically trained for this. “We had some practices where we turned off the air conditioning in our practice space in order to help us prepare for this tournament,” said Carolina’s Beth Row. “We knew every game was going to be very hard and that we hoped to play two in one day, so we did everything we could to build up our endurance.”

Tri City controlled much of the game right from the start. Their jammers Ova’Kill and Freudian Whip kept up a regular rotation with some fill-in by Skate Pastor and Preying Man Tease earned lead jam status the majority of the time and they were able to shut down Carolina’s scoring ability.

Unfortunately for Carolina, their high scoring jammer Sheeza Freak was injured early in this game and wasn’t able to return for the rest of the tournament.

Penalties didn’t seem to affect Tri City’s game as much as it did Carolina’s. Tri City collected 23 penalty minutes in the first period compared to Carolina’s 18. Unfortunately, Carolina gave up 4 power jams in the first period compared to Tri City’s 2 and Tri City was able to take full advantage of the time and collected 15, 25, 17 and 30 points in those jams whereas Carolina was only able to score 14 in one of them.

Tri City’s blockers used their truck-and-trailer and backwards blocking successfully, even when they were at a pack disadvantage and held Carolina scoreless in 65% of the jams. Heading into the half, Tri City sat on a significant lead: 144-52.

Early in the second period Carolina’s jammer hit the penalty box and Tri City’s Ova’Kill collected 24 points on her power jam. It looked as if the momentum was still in Tri City’s favor. But Carolina didn’t give up and the team continued to fight hard. They kept their penalties to 16 minutes (compared to Tri City’s 19) but their jammers took 5 trips to the penalty box although Carolina did not let Tri City run away with those power jams. Their blockers worked hard to limit the damage.

Carolina rallied hard in the second half however they were not able to shut down the Tri City offense and were not able to get around the Tri City defense often enough to catch up. Tri City was able to keep close to a 100 point spread for almost the entire second half

“Our second half was much stronger than our first half. We stayed out of the box more and the point differential in the second half was not as wide and we’re proud of that,” said Carolina’s Beth Row.

Final Score

(8) Tri-City Roller Girls 247
(4) Carolina Rollergirls 131