Spills & thrills

Trash and Smash, centre, a blocker for Les Contrabanditas takes out a member of La Racaille at the Montreal Roller Derby. (John Morstad)
More pictures

Don't let their retro-style skates and short skirts fool you. On the rink these roller derby vixens will trash talk and bodycheck their way to the finish. It's fast, rough and dirty - and it's bringing spectators to their feet
M.J. STONE

From Friday's Globe and Mail

November 23, 2007 at 8:46 AM EST

MONTREAL — The capacity crowd at the Aréna Saint Louis is on its feet. Gliding into a corner, Beater Pan Tease delivers a solid bodycheck that sends her rival, Miss Sassy Craft, tumbling. The felled player rolls forward with bowling-ball intensity, tripping up her fellow competitors as they advance behind her.

The audience roars as, one by one, the skaters lose their balance, crashing into a massive pileup of bodies.

Campy and irreverent, the inaugural season of the all-female Montreal Roller Derby was the summer's cult sporting sensation.

It's part of a resurgence that has crept across North America, with leagues springing up in Canadian cities such as Vancouver, Toronto and Hamilton.

Founded by Concordia University student Alyssa Kwasny (a.k.a. Georgia W. Tush), the MTLRD featured more than 40 women and three teams: La Racaille (Dirt), Les Contrabanditas (Pirates) and Les Filles du Roi, (The King's Prostitutes). With homemade uniforms and old-school roller skates, the players ham it up for the crowd with trash talk and threats of violence.

Add a plethora of spectacular falls and masked wrestlers duking it out between periods, and it's no wonder why Montreal audiences, fuelled on Pabst Blue Ribbon, whooped it up at the derby.

The sport has come a long way since the first event took place in Chicago in August, 1935. The brainchild of movie-theatre mogul Leo Seltzer, the 3,000-mile Transcontinental Roller Derby featured multiple two-person teams racing around a track 11 hours a day for an entire month. When Mr. Seltzer noticed how much spectators enjoyed the collisions and spills, he retooled the derby into the event it resembles today.

Although the roller derby's profile had been in steady decline since the 1970s, the sport has been boosted by Rollergirls, a reality TV show about the Texas Roller Derby League's Lonestar Rollergirls.

As practised in the MTLRD, it's a two-team contest that takes place over three 20-minute periods. Matches feature four "blockers" and one "jammer" per side. Jammers begin the race at the back of the pack and gain points by fighting their way past the opposing team's blockers, whose sole purpose is to push, shove and bodycheck the competition's jammer to the floor.

Zoe Brown, (a.k.a Di Nasty) - a filmmaker and community worker by day and roller derby vixen by night - could barely skate when she first joined Les Filles du Roi. "I was falling around like a helpless four-year-old."

But Ms. Brown now says that she loves competing in front of an arena full of rowdy spectators - despite the risk that she might get hurt.

"I love the speed and adrenaline and look forward to all the hitting and checking," she says. "Competing in the derby is a wonderful way to channel your aggression."

Awesome pictures of the 2007 ToRD Championship game

Here is another link to derby pics.

Championship coverage

Here is a link to an article on the championship bout. (I'd like to request that my friends remember that I'm camera shy, and would prefer if you don't comment on the pictures in such a way as to point out which person I am.)

We won!

I'm in pain, and I'm tired, but we won and I am so happy. I don't have any video from the game yet, but I'll post it if I get any.

Gore Gore Rollergirls

Here's an awesome video that our manager put together. Friends, please be discrete with your comments, don't reveal my identity, I'm shy!

Finally!

I finally got some frickin' air time, to bad it was just a passing shot of me sitting in the stands. I am dying to get on the news with one good clear shot of me in uniform, on the track, taking someone down, or being taken down, spectacularly.
In the mean time, check out this Canadian Press piece on Toronto Roller Derby.
Oh well, there's always next game, which if you're interested is this weekend. Let me know if you want tickets.

National Attention!

Roller derby taking off in Canada
By CHRISTOPHER MAUGHAN
TORONTO (CP) - They go by names like Killah Cupcake, Knina Knuckles, or Danger Mouse, and in their ripped fishnets and short miniskirts, they look a bit like burlesque dancers gone goth.

But these women aren't putting on some suggestive dance number - they're getting ready to race around a rink on rollerskates and knock one other down to the cold, unforgiving concrete of Toronto's George Bell Arena.

The women of the Toronto Roller Derby league are enjoying wild success in their first full season of play. In 2006, they started working to bring the retro 60s-era sport back. Today there are fledgling roller derby leagues in at least nine Canadian cities, from Vancouver to Montreal.

"The growth has been huge," says Danger Mouse, who's known as Jennie Boone to her non-derby friends. She plays in a new league in Hamilton that has only two teams so far. But she says she expects the league will double in size by next year.

And the six-team Toronto league, according to one of its co-founders, has become the biggest in North America, if not the world.

"There's a whole network of derby girls and we've checked every website out there. Most leagues have two to four teams and there are very few that have grown to five. And we're the only league that has six," says Monica Mitchell, a photographer by day who goes by Monochrome on derby nights.


Just like it was in its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, the sport is a brutal mix of bodychecks and trip-ups as players race around a track at breakneck speed, scoring points when a designated player, called a jammer, laps a pack of blockers.

Emily Simmons, who plays a Kiss-inspired character called Gene Scrimmage, says the sport is as rough as it sounds. She has seen her fair share of injuries.

"One girl from our team broke her ankle," she says. "One girl from the Death Track Dolls tore all her leg tendons... There's an old saying in roller derby: It's not if you get injured, it's when."

Simmons herself has a nasty scar on her knee, a souvenir from a practice when she fell to the ground and one of her pads got caught, causing her kneecap to scrape across a cement floor.

There's even the odd fight, according to Boone. She says one of the Hamilton teams, the Steeltown Tank Girls, was in Buffalo last week, where an opposing player made a habit of bodychecking from behind.

"She pushed one of our players into the boards head first... so there were words back and forth and eventually the ice broke," she says, adding that players even came off the benches to participate in the brawl.

"It's on YouTube," she says with a wry smile.

"There's definitely an element of spectacle (to the sport)," says Simmons, alluding not only to the violence but also to the dyed hair, spooky makeup and skimpy outfits typical of roller derby."We do play that up."

Each team operates under a chosen theme that governs how players are named. Saturday night in Toronto, the Bay Street Bruisers, a group of skaters in tight black t-shirts with paited-on ties, were taking on Chicks Ahoy, a group in mock green-and-black sailor suits.

Natasha Jesenak, a.k.a. Nasher the Smasher, is one of the Chicks. They're getting ready for their first public bout. She has a simple answer for anyone who asks about her style of play.

"Nasher's big and she hits people. I'm going to plow through everything and nothing's going to get by me... I'll just smash the shit out of them. That's my main move."

As much as roller derby is spectacular to watch, those closest to the game emphasize that it's a sport first, and a spectacle second.

Toronto League President Jennifer Capes, an elementary school teacher by day, says there are a lot of technical elements to roller derby that have to be learned, such as legal blocking and strategic skating.

She says the recent growth of the sport is a testament to how dedicated its players are. Unlike the roller derby leagues of old, which had TV contracts and big-time promoters, today's leagues are run by the skaters themselves.

"We don't have any big sponsors or promoters with billons of dollars," says Capes.

Like many modern derby girls, she says she remembers watching the sport as a kid, and was inspired to get into it through a 2006 A&E documentary series on a league in Austin, Tex.

She says a few women who knew each other through common friends got together at a bar and formed a team. After a year's hard work, they had a league up and running.

Capes says there's a lot of work ahead for women in other cities trying to get the sport to catch on. "They're learning and growing (as players) and you have to do a lot of that before you're ready to host an event."

Ottawa's Kelly McAlear says she's up to the challenge. She started a team a few months ago and is drafting players to form a team that would play against derby squads from Montreal.

She says she'd eventually like to get the sport going at the youth level, too.

"They have that in Vancouver where (they) teach the game to 12-year-olds and actually some of the daughters of the women on my team have expressed an interest."

Saturday night in Toronto, there was plenty of interest, with about 500 people showing up. Ron Wencer, who remembers going to bouts in New York in the 1960s, says he sees the spirit of roller derby living on.

"Just looking at the girls skating, and my fellow attendees here," he says, "I can tell there's the same gum-chewing attitude that there was back then."

Best fight so far...

I missed a game in Hamilton last weekend, and I am so bummed about it. The worst part is that I missed the best fight that Ontario derby has seen yet.
The Steeltown Tank Girls (Hamilton) were playing the all-star team from the Queen City Rollergirls (Buffalo). One of the Queen City girls came up behind one of the Hamilton girls and launched off her toe-stops and pushed her from behind, the Hamilton girl went head first into the boards, and got up and took the Queen City girl on.

The stuff you can do with Lego!

Yes kids, some cool cat made a rollerderby themed diorama out of lego.
Look at the little mohawks!

The jam is about to begin...

The jammers are poised, waiting for the whistle.

Loves it!

MTV Canada did a spot on rollerderby yesterday

There's a quick flash of me in there, click here to watch it.

Famous all the way to Seattle!

Check out this little blurb in the Seattle Times on Toronto Rollerderby.

We're huge in Seattle

Check out this little blurb in the Seattle Times on Toronto Rollerderby.

Last minute of Saturday's Bout

Click here to see a video that Ash took of the last minute of my bout on Saturday.

Mistresses of mayhem

Roller derby rocking T.O. again with plenty of action and bad attitude By BILL LANKHOF
Bones Brigade wipes out on top of Death Track Dolls teammate Jubilee as Lock 'n' Roll (left) and Alicia Arsenic (right) of the Gore-Gore Rollergirls skate by during Saturday's Toronto Roller Derby League bout at George Bell Arena. The six-team league is just one of several springing up around southern Ontario. (Mark O'NEILL/Sun Media)

Gonna tell you a story that you won't believe ...
The night that I fell in love with a roller derby queen
Round and round, oh round and round
The meanest hunk o' woman
That anybody ever seen

-- Jim Croce's lyrics from Roller Derby Queen
And, the lady -- I think it was the one dressing in the black widow-maker outfit, yells over the babble and dressing room laughter: "Hey, you don't mind if I take my top off to change, do you?"
Welcome to women's roller derby. Sure beats watching Darcy Tucker turn into a puddle of sweat. Already, I'm beginning to understand the, uh, appeal of this sport.
You thought roller derby went out with the hoola-hoop? Well, hold on to your poodle-skirt, Becky Sue. The game that takes sexual innuendo and trash talking and blends it with women who make hair-pulling an art form is making a comeback.
It's loud. It's profane. It's dangerous. It's fast -- the sport, not the women. I think. And, they're proud of it.
TATTOOED LADIES
It is a weekday evening at George Bell Arena and, in a dressing room, somebody's mother, your little sister and the girl next door are mingling with tattooed ladies and girls with metal rings hanging from their lips -- all of them morphing into the Death Track Dolls, one of six teams in the Toronto Roller Derby League, which opened its season last Saturday night.
Sandra Gilraine, a lovely lass of golden hair by day and captain of the Dolls says: "We have women from all walks of life. When we did auditions, we were looking for girls who weren't afraid of being in the spotlight, who weren't afraid of breaking a nail. We didn't necessarily take the girls who could skate the best.
"Roller derby is a lot about attitude. We can teach anyone how to skate. You can't teach personality."
It is also a lot about innuendo. Opening Night's motto? Cherry Poppin' Bout. You figure it out. We're not going there ... but, a lot of ordinary women are: The teams, with names such as the Hamilton Harlots and Gore-Gore Girls, consist of moms and managers, a bookkeeper, a realtor, waitresses, a musician. There is an astro-physicist by day. By night, they are mistresses of mayhem.
None of the skaters get paid. Money from ticket sales goes back to the league.
"We're a pro league but any money we make goes back to make the sport grow," Gilraine says, irked with any suggestion that getting knocked on to a concrete floor a dozen times a night is a funny thing to do for fun with not even enough of a payback to buy a tube of liniment.
The sport involves women skating on an oblong track. Each team has a skater in the rear who must try to push, swerve, duck flying elbows and hip checks and reach the front of the pack without getting so much as a rip in her fish-net stockings.
Meantime, skaters fall, get run over, curse, grin, high-five and frolic in the alter-egos of the pseudonyms they all adopt. It's a little like pro wrestling -- without the script.
Popular in the 1950s, the sport is enjoying a revival with more than 100 leagues in U.S. cities. Now teams are springing up in places such as Barrie, Hamilton, Windsor, Ottawa and Sudbury. The Toronto league has 80 skaters. The costumes and names are half the fun. At a Toronto league exhibition last week that attracted 500 fans, backers of the Chicks Ahoy team showed up in pirate costumes.
- - -
She was 5-foot-6 and 215
A bleached-blonde mama
With a streak of mean...
You know that I fell in love with a roller derby queen
Round and round, oh, round and round
"You've got to have one (a pseudonym). I mean how scary is (Tracy Ryan). It just doesn't do it in roller derby," Black and Blue Barbie says of her real name.
So, what are perfectly normal moms doing in a place like this?
"To be honest," says Barbie, "just skating isn't much fun unless you get to knock other people over."
Or, if you insist on a more cerebral explanation for risking limb, if not life, Gilraine explains: "For many of us it's about being a woman and being empowered; that we can succeed and excel at a sport."
As for the sexual undertones, no apologies. It's part of the program, Gilraine says. "I'm a woman and we show off a bit of leg. It's really not much different than the things the Raptors do during breaks. It's entertainment meets sports."
ANGER MANAGEMENT
Which explains Kinky K. She is the team's bad girl, her helmet emblazoned with "I'm A Bitch" just in case anyone forgets.
"The day I tried out, I had a bad breakup with my boyfriend," Kinky says. "I didn't even want to go, but (friend and teammate) Miss Tress Nightmare told me if I didn't get out of bed she'd drag me out and all the way over here with my mascara all over my face. I went. Now it's my anger management program."
Not to mention she gets to wear fishnet stockings and knock the crap out of anyone messing with Bonky Kong.
Bonky Kong is really Bianca Rooney and in real life she's the one with the pleasant smile who works for Dominion groceries as a bookkeeper and supervisor.
"I used to watch roller derby on TV when I was a kid and remember thinking it would be really cool to get flipped over the rail. My great aunt thinks what I'm doing is the coolest thing ever," she says.
"This is really me. I've got a job where I can't be telling people off even if I'm thinking: 'I can't believe you're bringing that back for 10 cents.' I never get mad at people. I'm the type to hold it all in. This is a great emotional release ... I can just let everything out."
- - -
Things looked kind of bad
Until the day she skated into my life
... She's my big blond bomber
My heavy handed hackensack mama
Round and round, oh round and round
There is animosity, even in the practice between the Dolls and another club called the D-VAS.
"We equate what we do with hockey. Fights aren't allowed but it is beneficial to your team if you can knock the other guy down." says Gilraine. "It's not like pro wrestling in that everything is choreographed. We don't plan who wins. It's like hockey in its intensity, speed and violence. That's the appeal ... and, oh yeah, the short skirts."
There are rules. No grabbing or tripping is allowed. Clothes-lining draws a penalty. So does elbowing. No fighting. Still, stuff happens. Girls will be naughty and the guys dressed up as referees have about as much chance of winning this debate as that time at home when they ended up sleeping on the couch.
Last week, says Amanda Caskie, they lost two players to a broken wrist and a torn ligament. She is a member of a three-piece, all-girl metal band called Cougar Party and looks like the girl next door. Then she saw a show called Roller Girls on A&E and heard about the Toronto league and figured a sport in which the worst penalty -- unofficially -- is for not looking good, can't be all bad.
"Mostly," she says, "its just such fun. It's hot chicks on skates kicking each other's butts."
---
SHOP TALK
(Derby jargon)
- Flat Track - A track outlined on a flat surface in an oblong oval shape. This is what the Toronto Roller Derby League plays on.
- Jammer - The girl from each team weaving her way through the pack, this is the only person who can score points for her team
- Blocker - a skater who tries to block the opposing jammer from coming through, while assisting her own jammer to get through.
- Jam - The rounds played during a period.
- Lead Jammer - The first jammer to legally make her way through the pack.
- Pack - The two groups of blockers and pivots skating in a pack and blocking the jammers
- Pivot - The skater who sets the pace for the rest of the pack. This role is crucial in formation of the pack.
---
NEED-TO-KNOW BASIS
Website: torontorollerderby.com
Tickets: $10 at Soundscapes, 572 College St.; Rotate This, 620 Queen St. West, or the website. At the door, $15.
Teams: Bay St. Bruisers, Chicks Ahoy!, Death Track Dolls, Deady Viper Assassin Squad (D-VAS), Gore-Gore Girls, Smoke City Betties.
Bouts: George Bell Arena, 215 Ryder Ave. at 7 pm.
On the schedule: June 16, Smoke City Betties vs. D-VAS; June 30, All-Star Game; July 14, Chicks Ahoy! vs. Bay Street Bruisers; July 28, Death Track Dolls vs. Smoke City Betties; Aug. 4, Bay Street Bruisers vs. Gore-Gore Rollergirls; Aug. 18, Chicks Ahoy! vs. D-VAS

Cherry Poppin'

This was in the Toronto Sun yesterday:
The women of the Toronto Roller Derby League begin play tonight at George Bell Arena at 7 p.m. Tickets are $15 at the door. It's kind of like hockey except that nobody has to pretend they are chasing a puck before thumping each other ...

Salt stains on my sweat pants

Yes kids, I practiced so hard on Wednesday for my game today that I ended up with salt stains on my sweat pants in the shape of the outline of my knee pads. Bleh. I hope all the work pays off.

Skating gets rough in roller derby revival

02/06/2007 10:49:29 AM

Leading her opponent on a lap of the oval track, a nimble skater decked out in a short skirt and blood-stained apron approaches a pack of skaters trying to impede her from passing through the group.

Saira Peesker

Smoke City Betties skater Demolition Dawn surveys the track in advance of Toronto Roller Derby's May 26 event. (Jessie Adams)

After struggling to get around a girl with an uncanny ability to put herself in the way, the skater's lead is terminated when she's knocked to ground with a hip check from her blind side.

Members of the 500-strong crowd leap to their feet, yelling encouragement to the fallen skater or congratulations to her aggressor.

This is roller derby -- the high impact and unabashedly bizarre sport experiencing a revival among athletes who feel more comfortable in fishnets than track pants; who'd rather put on a show than play to a set of empty bleachers.

The game places two teams of five girls on a flat oval track. One skater from each team -- the "jammer" -- has the mandate of passing as many of the opposing team's players as many times as possible.

The jammer fights her way through a gang of blockers ready to stop her or knock her down, then skates around the track as fast as she can to do it again.

She earns one point for each opposing skater she passes on each lap. Each round, or "jam," lasts two minutes or until the first jammer to break through the pack decides to call it quits. A full game ("bout") runs for three 20-minute periods.

Despite the obvious risk of injury and physical endurance required to play, derby is quickly becoming a subculture phenomenon in cities across Canada.

Following the success of Austin, Texas' Lonestar Rollergirls -- and "Rollergirls," the reality TV show that followed their exploits -- leagues or teams have popped up in cities including Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Hamilton, London, Halifax, Edmonton and Calgary.

"It's such a refresher from conventional sports," said Gordie Wornoff, 26, who attended Toronto Roller Derby's inaugural event dressed head-to-toe in a rat costume on May 26.

"I find most sports so typical, with sort of a tough-guy energy... There, I felt at home in my freakiness."

Costumes and pageantry: part of the game

Wornoff was part of a large group of friends who showed up at the event dressed in costumes. He defined his outfit as "bilge rat," saying he came from the depths of a sailing ship to cheer on his team.

While there were few other costumed fans among the crowd of about 500 assembled at the west-end arena, pageantry does hold a prominent spot in the game.

Competitors wear elaborate costumes and create "derby names" and personas to match.

It's a sport that boasts a punk-rock aesthetic -- players choose pseudonyms like Chili Con Carnage, Splat Benatar, Tara Part and Chastity Pelt. They're not exactly the type of gals one takes home to mom.

The Toronto league, the largest in Canada, is made up of six teams: The Death Track Dolls (who wear aprons splattered with blood), The Gore-Gore Rollergirls (wearing various shades of leopard-print); The Smoke City Betties (vigilante super-girls); The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (also known as the D-Vas); The Bay Street Bruisers (white-collar gals letting loose); and Chicks Ahoy (sailors gone wild).

While some leagues emphasize wrestling-like entertainment over athleticism, Chicks Ahoy captain Lindsay "Cookie Toss" Casey says she likes that the Toronto league has its priorities straight, focusing on the game.

"I like showboating as much as everybody else, but I don't want to see the actual sport get completely removed," said Casey, a public relations student. "I don't want it to all be about fishnets and what colour underwear everyone is wearing. I think there's a line, and I don't think our league is crossing that line."

League president Jennifer "Killah Cupcake" Capes, a member of the Bay Street Bruisers, sees the ideal balance as enough flashiness to bring in the crowds, but enough quality skating to keep them coming back.

"Certainly with six teams in our league there is more than enough room to develop rivalries and personalities for teams that we will want the public to get involved in," said Capes, a Grade 6 teacher.

"Financial success is really secondary to having a league that produces the kind of events that people are really excited to see."

Not so 'down and dirty'

It's the physical contact that not only thrills fans but also plays a main role in defensive strategy. While shoulder and hip checks are allowed and minor injuries are common; however, it's a far cry from the all-out roller battles that took place in the days of Skinny Minnie Miller, prominent derby queen of the 1970s and 1980s.

"I probably expected it to have more physical contact and was anticipating at least several injuries," noted Barry Leigh, a 57-year-old aerospace engineer who attended the Toronto event with his son. "Clearly, this version is a lot less violent."

Kathy Last, 48, can certainly vouch for that. The Guelph-based administrative assistant was a player in the sport's 1970s heyday. When she wasn't playing, she was following the Montreal-based Canadian All-Stars to their games, trying to learn whatever she could from the women she considered her "idols."

"You might have been prim and proper off the track, but there was a lot more physicality back then," she told CTV.ca. "We used to go behind (the opposing players) and knock them down. We'd do full-leg blocks across their midsections. It was down and dirty."

In fact, some of the most famous pictures of San Diego's darling Miller show her punching other skaters in the face as she passed them on the track.

That said, there was certainly enough aggression to keep many fans cheering at Toronto's Friends and Family Day on May 26, particularly those who were new to the game.

"I'd only seen it on TV and it was way more exciting than I expected," said Andrew McCracken, 24. "To see a bunch of sexy females pumped and pushing each other around... it was worth the trip."

Saira Peesker has covered news and Canadian Idol for CTV.ca and is a member of Toronto's "Chicks Ahoy" roller derby team.

4:14

Last fall I joined a rollerderby team. In the past I've been a bit skeptical about the whole fitness thing. And, getting into it, I don't think I really considered it a fitness commitment so much as an ass-kicking good time. But the fitness part of this thing is punishing. My feet have been like chopped liver all winter from my skates, practicing in a cold arena is not a good thing with leather skates that get stiffer the colder they are. I spent the winter being obsessed with the temperature of my skates on practice days. When the team started doing endurance training the first one was so rough that one of our team captains threw up.
Since I started last fall my fitness has improved immensely. I can see improvements with every practice, but when the skills and safety testing for the season started looming I started to get scared. The skills and safety testing is for our insurance coverage for the season, if you don't pass the test you don't play. Among other things, we have to be able to skate backwards, jump and land on our skates, and the scary part, skate 5 laps of the track in 1 minute and skate 20 laps of the track in 5 minutes. I've been sweating about this for weeks. The last time I did a trial run on the '5 laps in a minute test', I managed 4 laps in a minute. This was pretty far from the goal.
So I started looking for things I could do between practices to get my speed up. I went running by myself for the first time ever. My maximum heart-rate for that first running expedition, according to my exercise heart-monitoring watch gizmo, was 218 beats per minute. After that, I didn't really feel like going out again, but one of the girls I work with is a big fitness person, so I asked her if she wanted to maybe do some running some time. But then after I asked her, I started feeling self-conscious about the running, so I suggested that we should invite some other people at work who might be interested which turned into a real life Running Club.
Anyway, I've been working my tail off because I'm so afraid of the speed and endurance part of this test. And today it all paid off! I did my test and I got my 20 laps in 4:14, a full 46 seconds to spare. I am over the moon with relief. And... now I'm part of a running club and suddenly very fitness minded when all I really wanted was to kick some ass!

My weekend in Montreal and the first bout in Quebec

Well, as some of you know, I participated in my first bout this weekend, and I'm sure you're all clamouring to know how it went. It was amazing. We didn't win, but I think the victory was in our unbelievable comeback.
In the first period we were down between 20 and 30 points. The other team were slaughtering us. And then we changed our line-ups a bit and figured out their strategy and we started to come back. We kept scoring and scoring all the way through the 2nd period. By the third period we pulled ahead and stayed ahead all the way till the last jam when the other team pulled ahead and won 91-89.
The other team played really dirty. I'm not sure how many penalties they got, but at one point, they were two players down because of major penalties. At another point they were without a jammer because their jammer was sitting out a penalty(!). Our team, only got two major penalties the whole game, one was for accumulating 4 minor penalties and the other one, I got, for excessive violence. I can't say that I really agree with the ref's call, he did see me elbowing the other team's jammer, but somehow he couldn't see that at the time she was horse-collaring me and pushing me from behind. The only saving grace was that I didn't get another penalty for swearing at him and screaming in his face, "Couldn't you fucking see that she was pushing me from behind!?!?" - I think the reason I didn't get an extra penalty might have been because he was French and didn't understand all the names I called him.
I'm sure you're all concerned that I might have been injured during the game, but I'm OK, the only injury I got was when I pinched my finger when I was tying my skates before the game, it turned black and was incredibly swollen.