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the fresh and the furious: gta drift
July 18, 2012
The Border City Brawlers fresh meat team placed fourth out of fourteen teams in The Fresh and the Furious: GTA Drift tournament. We weren’t expected to perform that well; The Derby Nerd, a Toronto-based derby blogger, didn’t predict us making it through the first elimination round, and he wasn’t alone. We were ill prepared, having had barely two hours of dedicated scrimmage practice together as a team. But we came out strong in the morning placement round against Toronto’s D-VAS, who played a tight defensive game but didn’t really pull out a lot of strong offence, so with our own defensive weaknesses still untested we won the round 28 to 18, which put us in a good position going into the elimination round with a lower-ranked opponent, Lindsay, a very young league. BCB beat Lindsay 136 to 28 in what was the biggest goal differential in the tournament.
BCB vs D-VAS
BCB vs Lindsay
We then went on to win our quarter final bout 32-28 against Renegade Derby Dames (from Alliston), and to lose the semi final against Montreal Smash Squad (keeping them to a relatively low scoring game, 64 to 35, which felt like a pretty good result against the best league in the country). This put us up against the D-VAS once more in the battle for third place. After having fought back from their initial loss against BCB, the D-VAS had been shut out of the finals in a controversial reffing decision, so they were angry and had something to prove and they handed us our asses, 117 to 13.
BCB vs Renegade Derby Dames
BCB vs Montreal Smash Squad: this is me getting back blocked to the ground by Montreal’s jammer, which earned her a trip to the penalty box and us a power jam in our first jam against them. And for just a moment, we were up 18 points to zero against Montreal. Swoon!
BCB vs D-VAS, a much faster paced and rougher game than before
As for my playing, I was a bit outclassed and didn’t feel fully engaged in the games a lot of the time due to my still not-that-strong skating abilities (at this tournament, at least I wasn’t the only one). But I did manage to get in the right people’s way at the right time a few times, and to draw a few key back blocking penalties out of the other teams in doing so. And the next night back at practice I was way more on the ball in scrimmage than I’ve ever been before. I just needed to play against some girls I didn’t know to see where I need to do my work to improve.
Here is a nice round up of the tournament, from Derby Nerd.
Posted by jodi on July 18, 2012 at 7.14am
Categories: girls on roller skates, things are happening