Saturday: Noodles and Man Derby!

I hope you don’t have plans for Saturday, because it’s gonna be a huge day for derby lovers. HUGE! First, get your carb on with the Dames at our Spaghetti Feed Fundraiser. We’ve got noodles AND sauce (fancy, right?) plus silent auction stuffs! Come have lunch with us at Immanuel Lutheran Church at 315 Hamilton. If you get there around 11, you’ll have plenty of time to peruse the auction items and get your bids in.

After lunch you’ll have time to run home, get in a quick nap then head over to the Golf Dome in South Sioux City for the Korn Stalker’s very first home bout…EVER! The guys have already taken on Des Moines’ Your Mom Men’s Roller Derby and Fargo’s Rock City Riot. For their home opener, they will host Twin Cities’ TC Terrors. If you’ve never seen a men’s bout, this will be the perfect time to start. Tickets are available at the door for $12; doors open at 6 and the man-on-man action starts at 7!

And the Dame of the Month is….

FUNSIZE! Our own tiny-jammer-secret-weapon! Now, we have all seen what Funsize can do on the track; noodling through blockers like Mr. Fantastic, suddenly appearing as if from nowhere like Invisible Girl, turning her tiny body into an impenatrable rock wall like The Thing! (*note: in honor of Acme Comics’ upcoming Free Comic Book Day, I will henceforth compare everyone to superheroes…or supervillians if you rub me the wrong way)

Funsize, or Katie, or Wonder Woman, as she is sometimes known, spends her days fighting the forces of evil, non-biodegradable plastic products and humidity-bourne hair frizz, but by night, she, well, she still does all of those things AND she cranks up the awesome a little bit. When she’s not flying faster than a speeding bullet around the roller derby track, Funsize enjoys reading, ultimate fighting, Rockestra and Facebook stalking (she’s probably reading your status right now).

The resemblance...

...is uncanny!

Funsize hails from the neighboring planet, Hin-Ton, where she was exposed to radiation as an infant. Then, on a family vacation to Martha’s Vineyard with her sister, Anita Spur, she was bitten by a radioactive cheetah (what are the odds, right?). These events led to Funsize developing the super-duper powers of blinding speed, iron thighs, X-ray smelling and super-human juking.

Ah, no one can almost fall like Funsize!

Her secret weapons include: the Funsize whip, the almost-fall-fakeout and the flying squirrel block. Her only known weakness is the music of Gene Autry; it drives her into a deep state of depression, which can only be reversed by playing the song, I Believe I Can Fly.

Sioux City vs. Sioux Falls: A Brief Post-mortem

You know how I usually squeeze a bunch of stats into these blogs? Well, after waiting a while to get a look at the stats from our last bout, I decided that the final score really tells us all that we need to know. The Sioux Falls Roller Dollz won, 227-35. We were murdered–murdered, dismembered and and thrown into the river. Now that all of our body parts have washed ashore, we’re ready to put them back together (probably more along the lines of Frankenstein than The 6 Million Dollar Man).

So here’s what happened, to the best of my recollection. After the first few jams, Sioux Falls had established a commanding lead and had held us scoreless. We’re not accustomed to this happening and basically, we all lost our damn minds.  I was yelling, Dubbs was collecting penalties, Mo was laughing maniacally, Funsize was darting around frantically like a rabbit without a hole and I’m pretty sure our bench coach, The Rodster, was crying.

While we were busy forgetting how to play roller derby, the Dollz were–guess what–PLAYING ROLLER DERBY. They played a really great bout, as you may have gathered from the score. They are an incredibly strong team and we learned quite a lot from them.

The Dames did have a few notable highlights from the bout. Funsize and Mo each had a grand slam and, between the two of them, scored nearly all of our 35 points.  The team penalties were really something to be proud of, with our entire team only committing 25 minors and 15 majors (and, to be fair, about half of those were Dubbs , while the Dollz had 42 minors and 20 majors. It’s a small victory, but, hey it’s something to be proud of.

During the last jam of the game, Funsize decided that she would have a little fun and, instead of trying to score any points (which would have been pointless), she just blocked the opposing jammer, keeping her scoreless as well. This was, by far, the most entertaining jam of the game, as far as our bench was concerned, anyway.

At the end of the night, we didn’t win…not even CLOSE. But we had a great time and have since been working on the weaknesses that were so clearly brought into the open during this bout. We thank the Dollz and the town of Brookings for hosting this awesome evening of roller derby.