Fresh Meat takes on Rat City

Rat City’s Fresh Meat comes south to scrimmage Portland

RCR's Muttley moves in on Rat City's jammer

More than a few of us felt jittery when told our Fresh Meat program would scrimmage with Seattle’s Rat City Rollergirls Fresh Meat during Easter weekend.

Would the girls in green pulverize us? How would our skills stack up compared to another league? Our coaches had punted us out of our comfort zone and onto the track with a group of foreign skaters.

Scrimmaging on concrete

Also nerve-rattling was the absence of our familiar plastic tile floor, which had been relocated to Portland’s Memorial Coliseum for the bouts with Seattle. This left us with cold hard concrete, full of cracks, divets, and threats of unseen bolts (which never materialized in play zones). Also, thanks to Easter obligations and injuries, Rose City produced just enough skaters to fill two line-ups compared to Rat City’s sizeable crew.

Rat City gives RCR skater Vixen Mary a blocker sandwich.

Nevertheless nerves gave way to exhilaration as we went head to head for more than an hour with skaters much like us—girls honing their skills and gung-ho to play some derby.

The floor wasn’t all that bad either. It was slippery, especially on turn two where a number of us skidded out, but we quickly adjusted our footwork to adapt. I was relieved to discover crashing onto concrete wasn’t much worse than crashing on our plastic derby track.

Mixing it up

After a good scrimmage the teams mixed it up.

Skills matched nicely and we barely edged ahead of Rat City’s Fresh Meat for a final score of 81 to 73. Then came the best part—we mixed teams and skated with our former adversaries, getting to know them better.

Successful scrimmage

All in all it was a fun and successful event, enhanced by the glorious sunlight pouring in through hangar doors pushed wide open.

Hats off to RCR’s Wetback Attack and Shovey, Rat City’s Fresh Meat coach, for pulling the scrimmage together, and to skaters who showed up early to clean the floor.

And extra special thanks to Rat City’s Fresh Meat skaters who made the journey south and braved our concrete floor to scrimmage with us!

Rat City and Rose City Fresh Meat skaters after the scrimmage.

Thanks also to Rose City Fresh Meat skater Shaolin Spocker of Continuum Photography for the awesome shots (although we wish her knee wasn’t hurting so she could have skated instead).