The Juneau Rollergirls hosted some slammin’ sourdoughs for their season opener on Saturday.
Four Yukon Roller Girls made the trip to Alaska’s capital to participate in Nightmare on Egan Street, the Juneau roller derby club’s kick off for their fourth season.
“They are our sister city, our sister league, and usually when they have something going on we’ll get a Facebook message from the girls saying, ‘Want to come play with us?’” said Yukon Roller Girls’ Lindsay “Bonanza Babe” Agar. “And we’re like, ‘Yes. Yes we do.’”
The nightmarish event saw two teams with a mish-mash of players compete, including the hosting Juneau Rollergirls, the Yukon Roller Girls, the Boom Town Derby Dames from Mat-Su, Alaska, the Sitka Sound Slayers from Sitka, Alaska, and one from Seattle’s Rat City.
Agar and Yukon teammate Amanda Couch played on the Wolf Pack and Yukon’s Andrea “Honey Badger” Badger and Kyla “Roberta Bondage” Litke Wirth on the Body Snatchers.
In the end the Body Snatchers took it 185-178.
“It was kind of funny because we’re usually on the same team,” said Agar. “This year they really mixed us all up, which made for some really high-calibre derby. It was really fun to play because we’re able to do things that sometimes we wouldn’t be able to do because of a newer skater on the track with us. There was a lot of seasoned meat on the track this past bout.”
The Yukon Roller Girls, founded in 2010, are in a rebuilding year. The non-profit organization currently doesn’t have enough members to field a team and concurrently does not have any bouts schedule for this season.
They are hoping to find new recruits, a.k.a. “fresh meat.”
“We’re still skating, we practise twice a week,” said Agar. “We are slowly trickling in more and more girls ... We have three or four new fresh meat, and we’re always recruiting. So if some girl comes up tomorrow and says, ‘I really want to try,’ we’re always accepting of them.”
Nightmare on Egan Street was the first competitive action for the Yukon derby crew since May when four teamed up with Alaskans at the Season Finale Derby Mash-Up in Fairbanks. All four Yukon skaters were on the Black team that won 157-124 over the White team.
The Yukon Roller Girls went undefeated to win the first annual United We Roll Roller Derby Tournament - Alaska’s state championship - in Fairbanks in May 2013.
The Yukon Roller Girls, which was the only Canadian team to compete, clinched first place with a 179-120 win over Fairbanks’ Raven Rebels in the final.
Contact Tom Patrick at
tomp@yukon-news.com