Tucson Dust Devil Tournament

It was pretty awesome.

I thought I'd be pissed not playing. (Maybe more on that later) But I went as a coach. And as the head coach for the last month or so, and being center track with a team of women who are skating their asses off, leads me to believe there will be life after derbygirl in the form of derbycoach. It was actually pretty damn gratifying.

So here's the breakdown for those of you not up to speed:

1. The Dust Devil Tourn was the first national flat track derby tournament ever.
2. It was held in Tucson from the 24th through the 26th of February 2006.
3. The winner could hold claim to being the best flat track travel team in the nation.

So the way the tournament worked was:

• Three days, 20 teams
• First day:
• 4 pools of 5 teams each playing a round robin
• Each pool was seeded with teams 1-5, 1 being the top ranked team 5 being the lowest ranking team.
  
• The seedings where based on how long the league had been around, and how many inter-league bouts they had played.
• The top 3 teams will advance to the second day.
  
• (We were seeded 5th of the 5 in our pool--good luck, right?)
• Second day:
• Single elimination begins.
  
• Two rounds
• Third day:
• Semi Finals
• Finals (for 3rd place and for 1st place)

So there we were. Looking up at our pool:

• Arizona Roller Derby
• Mad Rollin’ Dolls
• Windy City Rollers
• Dallas Derby Devils
• B.ay A.rea D.erby Girls

Yep. There we are. The youngest, least experienced team on the board. Here's how Day one panned out:

Dallas Derby Dolls vs. BAD 15 to 21
Mad Rollin Dolls vs. BAD 27 to 14
Chicago Windy City Rollers vs. BAD 6 to 26
Arizona Roller Derby vs. BAD 25 to 25

So, we won 2, tied 1, and lost one. But look who we tied?! The first place seed. We lost to the second place seed. Every other pool of 5, the top three seeds advanced... very predictably. In our pool, team 1, team 2 and... team 5! advanced to the second day. Rock us.

We got the short straw for the second day two fold. We were to check in at 7am (guah) and play Carolina. Whom we watched completely trounce their competition the first day save for Minnesota. In the end, we lost to Carolina that fated morning, but not without a fight: 107 to 77.

Arizona, that team we tied ended up in 3rd place over all.

What does all this mean. Not a ton. But for a league that's only been around a year, has had zero inter league bouts, and has only had two home bouts: We kick some major fucking ass.*

*And that was without me skating. ;)