Nashville, TN

By The Oxford Commakaze

Gotham Girls Roller Derby squeaked past the Rose City Rollers to win their fourth straight championship in a down-to-the-wire game marked by shutdown defense and unreal jammer maneuvering by both teams, not to mention eight lead changes and two ties. Both teams found themselves pushed to the brink and almost perfectly evenly matched, forced to draw deep on their endurance, rules mastery and endless hours of practice to challenge each other all the way to the final jam.

Gotham’s Mick Swagger was nearly speechless after the game, taking several seconds to collect her thoughts before she could describe it.

“Everything felt so calm. I didn’t feel a moment of frustration or being nervous or even that we were going to lose,” she said. “I was completely confident in all of our lineups, even when we were down 12 in the last jam of the game. I absolutely knew we were going to win. Our preparation this year has been so amazing and so diverse … that it prepared us for every situation that we would be in.”

Bonnie Thunders put the first points on the board for Gotham in a 3-0 defense-heavy first jam, but the first lead change of the game came immediately afterward in a 9-0 jam for Rose’s Scald Eagle as Gotham’s Suzy Hotrod remained trapped behind a triangle of Rose City blockers. Gotham held Rose to just one point over the next five jams thanks to a series of lead jam calls in its favor, earned thanks to the juking footwork and sweeping dodges of its jammers.

As penalty trouble mounted for both teams, occasionally leaving one – or both – teams with micro-packs of just one or two skaters, Rose mounted a slow but steady comeback, putting at least 4 points up in each of the next four jams, forcing a 31-31 tie just twelve minutes into the game. Gotham snatched the lead right back in a 5-0 jam, but a straightaway-jumping Loren Mutch brought the game back within a point in the next jam. Although the crowd was on its feet and both teams were going full blast on the track, an almost unthinkable two-minute jam in which neither Gotham jammer Bonnie Thunders nor Rose jammer LickernSplit* were able to escape the pack left both teams both visibly exhausted but invigorated by the challenge of playing teams that could meet each other on truly equal playing ground.

At the last second of the two-minute leadless jam, LickernSplit received a forearm penalty, giving a power start to Suzy Hotrod and leaving Gotham with a 10-point lead, despite a vicious triangle of Rose blockers dedicated solely to restraining Suzy. A messy power jam for Rose a few minutes later brought the score back within two points as a glut of Gotham penalties left just two blockers for Scald Eagle to contend with, whom Rose’s Serelson made quick work of separating. Rose stole the lead away in a back-and-forth jam that saw both team’s jammers go to the box, but tournament MVP Loren Mutch outscored Gotham’s Miss Tea Maven by the end for a 54-56 lead. The lead was quickly was edged out by Gotham for its own 2-point lead in the next jam as Vicious van GoGo pushed Rose’s blockers out of play for lead and a fast call with Scald Eagle hot on her heels. Although there were less than three minutes left in the half, there was enough time for one more lead change: a 1-point squeaker in which LickernSplit edged Bonnie out for lead and snatched 3 points, enough for a single-digit lead. By the last jam of the period, Rose clung to a slim 64-58 lead.

Gotham, unaccustomed to being behind, was not content to remain in that position for long, and held Mutch behind an unrelenting wall of recycling Gotham blockers while Hannah Jennings and Jes Rivas tried to hold a tearing Bonnie Thunders at bay, resulting in a 29-point jam and an 87-64 score. Scald Eagle grabbed a handful of points for Rose in the next jam, utilizing three quarter-sized spaces on the inside line to escape the Gotham blockers lined up to hit her, but a Gotham power jam after blocker Fisti Cuffs jumped back to pull a track cut on LickernSplit brought the team back to the 33-point lead it held at the beginning of the half.

However, Rose was no more content to sit behind, and mounted an offensive comeback that started with a power jam for Loren Mutch, who fended off body-slamming hits by weaving on one foot past the outside of the pack to put up 20 points for Rose with Suzy trapped in the pack after returning from the box. The teams held each other nearly scoreless for the next few minutes, using both molasses-slow defensive walls and quick offense alike to ensure jammers escaped the pack within seconds of each other, forcing fast ends to the jams. In one of the odder moments of the weekend, Vicious van GoGo received a low block for attempting to crawl on the ground between Rivas’s legs mid-jam, and Rose picked up 19 points in the subsequent power jam to narrow the gap to 10 points, 106-96, but Gotham was able to add a handful of points in a series of hit-and-quit jams following.

Although Gotham held Rose scoreless for three jams, it was only able to add nine more points to its own score for a total of 123-96, hardly a comfortable cushion in such a back-and-forth game. That lead proved uncertain as Rose surged forward with another creeping point push, holding Gotham scoreless for four jams – enough to force the second tie of the game, 123-123, with just six minutes left in the game.

Bonnie brought the lead back for Gotham, using the tiniest sliver of track on the inside line to grab lead over a barely tailing Scald Eagle, but Loren Mutch surpassed that lead in the next jam, using the momentum of swinging Gotham blockers to ping-pong her way through the pack and 8 points for a 3-point lead, 127-131, as a trapped Bonnie was forced to pass the star to stem the bleeding. With less than four minutes left in the game after a Gotham timeout, Rose seemed to be heading for victory after Scald Eagle tore through the pack for lead jammer and skated circles untouched around the pack while Suzy struggled to escape the pack, despite offense by Mick Swagger and OMG WTF.

A cut-track penalty to Scald Eagle with barely two minutes left stopped Rose’s scoring and gave Suzy an opportunity to narrow the gap by five more points, 132-144 still in Rose’s favor. After a failed official review asking to release Scald Eagle from the box, the jam started with less than two minutes on the clock and Bonnie on the line, meaning that she could choose to run the clock out if she earned enough points and called the game off with no time on the period clock – which she did. After picking up 15 points, which Scald Eagle could not counter after re-entering the track and getting trapped behind a Gotham wall, the period clock ran to zero and Bonnie called the jam to end the game with a final score of 147-143.

“I think you focus on each jam, not really on the scoreboard necessarily,” Thunders said. “The scoreboard is just a point in time, and so as the minutes click down and the seconds roll away, it’s really just about knowing what you need to do in that jam in order to send the game your way.”

The win marked Gotham’s fourth straight championship and 57th victory in a row. Despite the team’s dominance, Bonnie said there is still more to go.

“I think that’s the special thing about our team. We don’t go into a season thinking about everything that happened previously. Those experiences are preparation, but they don’t give us any wins,” she explained. “They prepare us to play better than another team under high-pressure games, or to make smart decisions, or to build players to do all these things, but they don’t give us a win. There’s a lot more work to come after that.”

Final Score

Gotham Girls Roller Derby (Sacramento #1) 147
Rose City Rollers (Charleston #1) 144