And Another!

WAAAAAAAHOOOOOO!!! Tiger Bay Brawlers' first public bout will be on 15th January 2011 in our own fair city of Cardiff! Well, Penarth but it's not far away. It's so very exciting.

Sadly for me, I won't be on the travel team as I'm having laser eye surgery on 15th December and have to have a month off skating. There's no way I'd be able to get up to bout standard between now and December but I guess I'll get reading up on my NSO stuff instead!

The team are psyched for it too, but I think it's gonna hit home soon that this shit is real now, we're not just playing at it anymore and we are going to have to do it in front of people who have paid money to watch us. I'm so excited to find out who's going to be on the travel team!

Bout Date

We have our first travel team bout date! We will be playing the London Rockin' Rollers B team on 19th March at their place. This is getting very scary.

GRG ref bootcamp and scrimmage

This weekend a few of the Glasgow Rollergirls came down with their ref Doc Skatan to host a referee bootcamp for us, then scrimmage with us on the Sunday with a few of the Bristol Harbour Harlots thrown in too. I've no idea how it was, because I wasn't there. SULK. I met GRG when six Brawlers travelled to Glasgow to film an episode of the quiz show Eggheads (yes, really) and they were great so I'm sure everyone had a really rad time. The episode of Eggheads will be airing next year at some point.

Random Publicity

As part of another seemingly derby-filled weekend which featured a 3 hour committee meeting on Friday night and the usual 3 hours training on Sunday, five of us met up in town on Saturday to have pics taken for this newspaper article. The reason we were involved is not strikingly obvious I agree, but our team rep works in a shop in one of the arcades and bagged us some free publicity (althhough we weren't actually mentioned at all, even in the photo caption in the print version which read "The girls from The Roller Derby Team launch and hand out the new arcades leaflet." and then listed our mispelled names. "The Roller Derby Team"? Oh well).

Shop & Shoot

Today was a good day. TBB's lovely Peril Flynn took me to the parcel depot a whopping 10 miles away to pick up my delivery all the way from The Bruised Boutique over the pond. They're a derby run store and answered all of my emails really quickly. Highly recommended if you can't get what you want UKside. I bought limited edition leopard print Smith Scabs and I am enraptured with them. They are pure furry protective joy and now I will be able to throw myself on the floor as much as I want without fear of nasty bruises on my knees and impending mobility problems. I also upgraded my nasty Anarchy elbow pads to some nice open Pro-tec ones and invested in a decent skate tool with a fancy bearings press and axle rethreader- not that I can see myself needing to rethread my axles in the forseeable future but hey, it's orange. I also happened upon the cutest ever piece of luggage yesterday on my search for a new skate bag, and knew on the spot I had to own it. It's a wheeled case in this fabric:

Then after a swift costume change we lugged our kit with us on the 30 minute walk into Cardiff city centre and skated around the bustling Saturday shoppers in the High Street Arcade and St Mary Street for some shots for local newspaper the South Wales Echo. It was an interesting experience but no-one fell over and we got some team publicity!

Battle Royale

This event was the most fun I've had without wheels on for a long time. We got the Brawler Bus at 12 and so arrived in plenty of time for doors at 4.30pm- more than enought ime to have a wander round the merch stands where one could find everything from shoes to cupcakes, Krispy Kreme doughnuts to skate apparel. I got myself some lovely new Roces wristguards for a very reasonable price! And maybe even enough time for a sneaky visit to the bar...

The bout started off with the All-Stars taking the lead but LRG's London Brawling soon took it back and won the bout by a considerable margin. No-one one let this dampen their spirits though and if anything I'm hoping it will mean the All-Stars train more together over the coming year and give LRG more of a challenge. We were all damn proud of TBB's own #666 BB Bombshell who blocked her socks off and a star jamming performance was given by London Rockin' Rollers' #101 Jack Attack.

Photo: LoKill Hero

At the end of the bout I managed to catch up with old-but-new friend over from Eye Candy For Magpies who recently entered the world of derby through LRG's rec league, it was the first time we'd seen each other in person for a few years and since we've both become derby-obsessed bloggers!

The next natural step in our day was the after-party where we got to have right old knees-up with the biggest and dare I say finest mix of rollergirls we have so far encountered as a team. The less said about the karaoke the better.