This night was the Devil's Night Dames season debut, and being the only team to not play yet this season, they were the biggest x-factor coming into this bout. They had first pick in the player draft, and they used it to take Doom Shakalaka. The Dames would end up with a total of five rookies on their new roster. D-Funk won the first bout of the season by one point. A win is win, but with such a small margin, they certainly couldn't afford to rest on their laurels.
Jam one saw draft pick number one Doom Shakalaka jam against Roxanna Hardplace. Jamming for her team in her first ever bout, in her team's first bout of the season. Incredible amount of pressure for a rookie. Roxanna would take lead jammer status, score four points, and quickly use her lead jammer perogative to call off the bout before Doom had a chance to catch her. The second jam had D-Funk's Tinja outpacing Yo-yo just long enough to score another four and call the jam. Formosa Fury scored the Dame's first point of the night in the third jam, before calling it off just as opposing jammer Roxanna Hardplace was about to catch up, making the score 8-1 in favor of D-Funk.
All throughout the bout there was a lot of strategic jam ending. Both teams seemed to be very aware of that golden moment when they could end the jam just after scoring their points, and just before their opponent could score any at all. In jam four, Polly Fester would give D-Funk four unanswered points. Feta Sleaze put three unaswered points on the board for the Dames in jam five. Jam six went scoreless. D-Funk's hard defense stopped Swift Justice from scoring any, as their own jammer spent most of that jam in the penalty box. Yo-yo gave the Dames three unanswered points in jam seven. It was a series of small incremental point additions and short jams, putting the score at 12-7, D-Funk.
The eigth jam saw the first big play of the night. Tinja was jamming for D-Funk against the Dame's Muffy Mafioso. Tinja scored the first grand slam of the night while her teammates shut down Muffy, increasing the lead to 21-7. This was followed up by another big D-Funk play in jam nine. Ally Sin Shoverland gave her team eleven points as tough defense stopped Feta Sleaze from scoring. Jams eight through thirteen were consecutive shut-outs by D-Funk, as their defense dominated the game. Roxanna scored five in jam ten. Ghetto Barbie had a grand slam and scored nine in the eleventh. Ima Wrecker jammed for 4 in the twelth. D-Funk rookie Meryl Slaughterburgh made her jamming debut in the thirteenth jam, and added another two points to make the score 52-7.
The Dames just barely broke out of that shut-out slump by scoring two point in jam fourteen. They would also make their first big play of the bout in the fifteenth, as Yo-yo gave them 9 unanswered points, making it 52-18 with 5:30 left in the bout.
Ima Wrecker scored a quick four in the sixteenth, followed by a quick five from Eight Mile Rose in the seventeenth before going to the penalty box. Yo-yo would jam for the eighteenth and final jam of the first half unnopposed as Eight Mile sat in the box, and she gave the Dames 7 points to make the score 61-25 in favor of D-Funk at halftime. While D-Funk had more than twice as many points as the Dames at this point, there wasn't any sense that the bout was already decided. Teams have overcome deficits of that size in the past.
The halftime entertainment was a presentation by the Downtown Boxing Gym Youth Program, the Detroit Derby Girls' favored chairty of the season. The kids seemed nervous as they took turns discusing their accomplishments in front of the crowd, but they looked totally natural as they displayed some of the boxing drills.
I'm not even goint to try to slowly draw out the results of the second half. D-Funk's defense was on point and dominant. The Dames would only score another four points for the rest of the bout. D-Funk started the second half with another shut-out run. Eight Mile Rose scored four in the first jam. Roxanna Hardplace had a triple grandslam in the second and scored 20. The third saw no points for either team.
Muffy Mafioso put the Dames' first point of the game on the board in the fourth jam, making the score 85-26. Jams five through twelve was another series of consecutive shut-outs by D-Funk. Meryl scored five in the fifth. Tinja added 10 in the sixth. Another non-scoring jam in the seventh. Ally Sin Shoverland jammed for 4 in the eigth. Meryl would get a grandslam and fourteen points in the ninth, even handing out a nasty knockdown on her own as she punched through the pack. Scoreless in the tenth. Ally for four in the eleventh, and Tinja for another three before the shut-out came to an end.
Rookie Doom Shakalaka took lead jammer status for the Dames in the thirteenth jam and scored three, while opposing jammer Tinja added two. This would be the last time the Dames scored this bout, with the board at 127-29, and ten minutes left on the clock. As you can probably guess, the remainder of the game, jams fourteen through twenty was another D-Funk shut-out. D-Funk rookie Meryl Slaughterburgh then made a twenty point, triple grandslam. Ally scored 3 in the fifteenth, Meryl for four in the sixteenth, Ima for five in the seventeenth, eleven from Fatal Femme in eighteenth, five from Bytch Ryder in the nineteenth, and finally, ten from Cat's Meow in the twentieth, for a final score of 186-29.
Rookie sensation Meryl Slaughterburgh was named the MVP of the bout. D-Funk placed second last season, so Meryl would have been the fourth overall draft pick at the earliest. Looks to me like they had a sharp eye for talent.
Even thought the result was a blowout, watching it play out wasn't drag at all. This wasn't like the yearly Notre Dame versus Navy game. We got to see a rookie give a breakout performance, and we got to see what a stellar defense should look like.
The Dames' biggest deficiency in this bout would have to be their lack of offensive blocking. Throughout the bout D-Funk would have their blockers form a wall at the front of the pack, and their walls were rarely penetrated. D-Funk would hold down that space in the pack jam after jam, and the Dames' blockers often didn't try to challenge D-Funk's position up there.
Enough from me, here's what D-Funk Captain Fatal Femme had to say:
Detroit Area Dork: What's your inital response to the bout?Fatal Femme: I'm really glad, number one, that one of the rookies got MVP. That's one the best experiences a captain could feel. It's never been done. I'm extremely proud that it went to a rookie instead of a vet. It shows how much she's been practicing, how much she fights.Detroit Area Dork: What do you think put you ahead in this bout?Fatal Femme: I think because we have such a large return of vets, and the rookies we did get are extremely talented. Coming in a with a solid team makes it easier to win.Detroit Area Dork: With a win like this, is it hard to find errors to correct for the next bout?Fatal Femme: You can always do better. There's not a single thing we do that doesn't need practice.Detroit Area Dork: What do you think you're going to work on the most in the upcoming practices?Fatal Femme: Switching to offense quicker. I think that we have really good defense, but we're slow to react to help our jammers in the back of the pack, so I think we're going to focus on thatDetroit Area Dork: We didn't see a lot of stationary blocker walls in this bout? Why didn't that happen more this time?Fatal Femme: I didn't really think about until now. The pack just kept moving. If you stop the wall dead, you get twenty feet, and they were calling that really well this game. So I don't know if subconsciously we decided not to come to a complete stop.
There was no animosity from Devil's Night Dames Captain Yo-yo, or Co-Captain Oi! Rish:
Detroit Area Dork: What are your initial thoughts about the bout?Oi! Rish: I'm really proud of our teamYo-yo: We've come a long way since last year. The first half we came out really strong. We were fighting, we were only down by like 35 points. It felt like we were really motivated and determined, hitting hard and staying busy.Oi! Rish: Everything we've been working on, we did. We played hard until the very end, so I can't be unhappy with that.Detroit Area Dork: How do you think the other team was able to pull ahead?Yo-yo: I'm still trying to figure that out. I might have to think about it all day. They have a really strong defense, they were recycling a lot. They may have been able to break our walls up, more than we were breaking up their walls in the second half.Oi! Rish: They have a lot of experience.Yo-yo: They have almost all vets on their team. I think they only have two new rookies. We have five rookies. So they're a team of veteran skaters that probably have five years of experience or more. We're more of a younger, newer team. So each team we play is going to be a learning experience, and we're going to learn and grow from there.Detroit Area Dork: How do you think your rookies did today?Yo-yo: Awesome.Oi! Rish: They were unbelieveable.Yo-yo: They were better than me when I was a rookie last year. I think they kept fighting until the very end, they played tough. I think D-Funk is going to remember getting hit by them.Oi! Rish: They have no fear. That's the best thing. Most people are scared, but the rookies have no fear, they just went after all the girls. I'm pretty impressed.Detroit Area Dork: What do you think your team needs to work on the most for the next bout?Yo-yo: I think we need to continue with what we're working on. We need to get tighter together, more communication, and we need to be more aware of the opposing jammer, when the opposing jammer is coming through. I felt like we were really focused on getting our jammer out fast, that we sometimes forgot about the opposing jammer coming into the pack.Oi! Rish: Coming off the holiday too, it's hard when there's not enough time to practice, and team time is really important. I think in the next couple of weeks we're going to spend a lot of time together.Yo-yo: We thought of some new drills to bring into the next practice.Oi! Rish: We're pretty much obsessed with each other, so we'll be spending hours together for days before the next bout. We're excited, we're big fans of GPM [Grand Prix Madonnas]. We're playing them on the fourth, and that's going to be a great bout. A lot of my class from last year is in that group. It'll be a lot of fun.Detroit Area Dork: There didn't seem to be a lot of penalties this bout. Your team was very well behaved.Oi! Rish: We are, we're one of the least penalized teams.Yo-yo: Last year we did have the least amount of penalties as a team.Oi! Rish: I played through-out a lot of the game, and I only went to the box once, for a combination of four minors. That's not bad for playing most of the game.Yo-yo: I had one major. They called me on a major, but they made the wrong call, so they told me to go back out.Oi! Rish: We pay a lot of attention to the rules, because we want to be safe. It's important to be safe for each other, and the other team.Yo-yo: One thing I say to the team before we play is, "Play clean and play smart. Be aware of what you're doing. Try not to go for those late hits when you're making a dive or going for an elbow".Oi! Rish: That's how you win games, by not committing penalties. And getting lead jammer, which we had a problem with today.
Get your tickets ahead of time for the next bout on January 21st, and see The Detroit Pistoffs take on The Pistolwhippers
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I'm a dork, I live in the Detroit area, and sometimes I take blurry photos on an outdated camera
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