The AllStars had their first travel game of the season last weekend at the Clover Cup tournament hosted by the Dallas Derby Devils in Texas. The first game was at 8pm Friday night against Houston Roller Derby who were ranked #45 in WFTDA.

We expected the game to be tough. Houston is a strong team who have lots of Division 1 playoff tournament experience. When we played them last season we managed to hold on to a small lead until the second half of the game, when Houston came out in full force to overtake us in a decisive victory. This year, although HRD was missing one of their star players, Freight Train, who was able to rack up the points while jamming against us last season, they came out with a crushing defensive style that was able to keep our jammers hung up in the pack long enough for Houston to get lead for the first several jams. An early powerjam against Houston allowed us to briefly match their points, but once they regained momentum they were able to run away with a victory.

We were a little bummed, but still in high spirits. We always have a good time playing Houston and we all felt that we had some really successful moments in the game against a really tough opponent. I was inspired by the skating of Houston players like Death by Chocolate, Singapore Rogue, and Speed-o Lisa and I felt lucky we got to play another game in the morning because it would give us an opportunity to hone our skills, correct our mistakes, and play a better, more cohesive game.

We were able to accomplish that in our next game against the Gold Coast Derby Girls on Saturday. They had some very talented individual skaters, but our teamwork was tighter than ever and we pulled out ahead early and kept our lead throughout the game. I attribute a lot of our success in this game to our defensive players who were able to bottle up jammers over and over again and use smart bridging techniques to keep our blockers in play. Gold Coast had a loss earlier in the day to Blue Ridge so it’s possible they were feeling a bit fatigued or disheartened, but they played hard for the entire game and had excellent positive energy on the track. Bitchin and Rollin had some very successful and memorable jams as both a jammer and a blocker. I look forward to playing this team again at home later on in the season.

In the locker room, everybody got out their tournament programs to take a look at the bracket. Clover cup is a double elimination tournament so if we had lost to Gold Coast (as anticipated- Gold Coast outranked BERG at the time of the tournament) we would have been finished. However since we actually won we got to play one more game. We were ecstatic! Who would we play? The losing team from Houston Vs Dallas game later on that day. Historically, Houston has been higher ranked than Dallas, and they were expected to win but Dallas had already been on an inspiring winning streak for the start of the tournament- crushing their competition. We knew this would be a fun game to watch, and ultimately Houston suffered the same fate as all of Dallas’ opponents- falling to the Army of Darkness, who went on the win the entire tournament for the first time in Clover Cup history. We had to play Houston again.

It was hilarious to us that it worked out this way. We were teasing the Houston skaters by saying, “we know you like us but y’all didn’t have to lose just to play us again. seriously! we’ll play you any time!” we even posted a picture on their locker room door of BERG skaters with speech bubbles talking about how we’re going to play Houston again and wondering “Why are they so obsessed with us?” I was a little disappointed that we didn’t get to play a new opponent but I also felt like this was an awesome chance to apply the lessons we learned in the first game against Houston and be more successful in the rematch. Although Houston came out on top for the second time, our defense was stronger and we were able to play a slightly closer game against Houston the second time around. We cheered “we did better!” and took pride in our progress, even though it wasn’t a Win.

Aside from all the awesome roller derby action we had an incredible time hanging out and bonding with each other. Muttley and Trauma continued the tradition of getting a flat tire on derby trips but it was ok because they found spirit animals for everybody. We went on secret late night trips for In-N-Out “BERG”ers- animal style. We made groceries in super hero masks and wondered if the entire city was really one giant parking lot? We had victory queso and margaritas and Neura licked everybody’s glass. We watched travel channel shows about Snake and Jake’s in New Orleans because we were so homesick. We all pretended we didn’t know NoBo so that we didn’t embarrass her. I snuck away for a skatepark session and HarmAKnee impersonated me. We laughed, we sang, we took epsom salt baths. And we never found out if there was a giraffe in the pool!

-Abeata Applebum, #93