Nashville, TN

By The Oxford Commakaze

The Rose City Rollers raced to an early 61-1 lead over the Windy City Rollers within the first five minutes of their first game at the international 2014 WFTDA Championships and never looked back. Both teams, which had not met since back when minor penalties were relevant, played a heavily defensive game that left jammers for both teams exhausted from pushing against nearly unmovable walls.

Photo by Joey Miller

The game opened up with two huge scoring runs for Rose, first a 34-0 run for Loren Mutch followed by a 25-point opportunity for Scald Eagle, allowing only one point by Windy’s Sandrine Rangeon as she raced to snatch a point before Scald called the jam. A rash of penalties to Windy City’s blockers slowed them right out the gate, allowing Rose’s blockers to separate the one or two remaining Windy blockers on the track for easy scoring passes. A series of fast hit-and-quit jams padded Rose’s lead, but a nearly two-minute jam in which Scald Eagle ran the clock to spring her blockers from the box also let Windy put up 12 points, bringing the score to 82-13.

“Already knowing that the game was going to be super hard, we just spotted them a good half a hundred points immediately,” reflected Windy City coach Justice Feelgood Marshall. “If that sequence had occurred later in the game, I think the game would have been closer overall, so it was unfortunate that we had that penalty spiral instantly, right off the bat.”

“We came into this tournament knowing that Windy City are a really tough team to play. They’re really physical, they’re really big, and their jammers are known for how aggressively they push through the pack, so we knew this wasn’t going to be a cakewalk by any means,” said Rose’s Hannah Jennings. “I think what was really good and really needed for Wheels [of Justice] was that 59-point run right out of the gate. It was really good to start the game with such a statement. Windy didn’t take that lying down. They were really, really tough. They put our jammers through the wringer from start to finish.”

Photo by Joey Miller

Although Rose had a definitive lead throughout the first half, Windy’s defenses kept Rose from running away with the game. A 61-1 lead within the first five minutes looked intimidating, but Windy held Rose to barely doubling its score for the rest of the first half while building up its own score as well, thanks to containing its own players’ penalty troubles and capitalizing on a set of Rose jammer penalties. Pack advantages left Windy free to play some offense for its jammers, allowing the team to rebuild its focus while putting points on the board. Speed-stealing defense from Rose’s Hannah Jennings and Shaina Serelson matched the aggressive blocking of Windy’s Bork Bork Bork and Yvette YourMaker, keeping scoring in the last half of the first period relatively even, pushing the score to 140-58 at halftime.

Both teams saw a slow build at the beginning of the second half, with each losing jammers and blockers and jumping on the other team’s gaps. The teams traded points until Rose’s formidable walls contained Windy’s jammer so fully that Loren Mutch was able to put up another 26 points to Rose’s 7, running the jam even after Windy jammer Varla Vendetta escaped the pack by stashing the jammer panty, picking up a few points on subsequent passes.

The teams continued trading small point runs for the middle ten minutes of the second half, with packs slowing to a crawl as both teams went back to walled-up defenses. Although Rose was never less than a hundred points ahead thanks to soul-crushing jammer containment by Jes Rivas and Scylla Devourer, Windy slowly closed in on the point ratio to bring it from 3:1 at halftime to barely 2:1 by the middle of the second half. Rose started forcing pivot line starts to take advantage of Loren Mutch’s bursts of speed right off the line, but Windy countered with a subsequent lead jam for Jan Trainor using the same method.

Photo by Donna Olmstead

Although Windy chipped away at Rose’s lead almost immediately, after containing that 61-1 lead in the first five minutes, ferocious defensive blocking by the entire Rose squad and delicate footwork by jammers LickernSplit and Kate Thomason, marking her return to the Rose squad for the first time in two years this weekend, proved insurmountable. Windy, pushing to the last minute, picked up 12 points in the last jam as lead jammer Scald Eagle ran down the clock, but Rose called the game for a final score of 251-133.

“One of the best things about Windy this year is that we learned to not panic when things are going very badly, and there was no question that things were going very badly in the first five minutes,” Justice said. “I was very proud of the way we were able to focus. Even though we weren’t able to mount a full comeback, we didn’t allow the first five minutes to define the whole rest of the game.”

The Rose City Rollers will play the B.ay A.rea D.erby Girls at 6:30 p.m. central time in the semifinals. Jennings said that, although the team has some cleaning up to do before this evening’s game, particularly in tightening up penalties, Rose is ready to fight.

“Bay Area have wanted this for a long time, and I know that they’re hungry – you can see it in how they play,” said Jennings. “But we’re hungry, too, and we’ve been working really hard. No matter what, I know it’s going to be a strong, physical game and I can’t wait to play it.”

Final Score

Rose City Rollers (Charleston #1) 251
Windy City Rollers (Evansville #2) 133