photo by Gil Leora

UPDATED! When the last drop of sweat had been dropped Saturday night at the UIC Pavilion in Chicago, the Double Crossers had earned a spot in the Windy City Rollers Ivy King Cup Championship game on June 5th. With several key veterans off skates and three blockers playing over 85% of the jams, the Crossers thumped the defending champion Manic Attackers, 121-91. 

 The Double Crossers showed up intending to finish off the Manics and avoid a second-place bottle-neck heading into the last game of the season on May 22nd. With a win, the Manics' route to the championship game would be blocked only the winless Hell’s Belles. The Manics jumped out to an 8-0 lead on slick-looking jams by Beth Amphetamine and Ruth Enasia, but the Crossers crept back to tie the score at 8 in the eighth. In the tenth, Manic jammer Wreck N Shrew was playing tight defense on her Crosser counterpart, Julia Rosenwinkel, when first one and then two Manics were sent to the box. Rosenwinkel cut loose for a grand slam and 4 more before calling it. The Crossers went on a 19-5 run over the next four jams despite some stalwart penalty-killing effort by Amphetamine in the fourteenth.  Di Richmond, in her third season as a Windy City Roller, had more than double the number of offensive and defensive actions, 38, than the second most effective Manic blocker. Increasingly agile in traffic, Richmond shows an ability to move from offense to defense and back again on consecutive strides.  Manic fans have not forgotten Malice in Chains just yet, but Richmond has become the Manic to watch in the pack.

 With the Crossers up 38-13 going into the fifteenth and the crowd growing quiet, Richmond clamped down Crosser jammer Donna Party, allowing Wreck to register a grand slam; Party joined two Crosser blockers in the box and Wreck put up 15 more before the whistle blew four times. Wreck scored 38 points on thirteen jams to lead all Manic scorers, picking up the slack for Zoe Trocious, who was ill over the past couple of weeks and played only sparingly as a blocker in the second half. The Manics cut the Crosser lead to 38-37 in the sixteenth on an athletic jam by Amphetamine, but clogged the penalty box on the next jam, handing Rosenwinkel, the league’s leading scorer, a free pass. The six-year veteran put up 19 before calling it off, and the Crossers went to halftime up 57-39.    

 While the Manics seemed to lose this one in the penalty box, racking up 62% of the bout’s majors and 42 team minutes, the Crossers played with typically astute pack awareness, anchored by three players who never seemed to leave the track--Georgia on Yer Behind, Karmageddon, and Norma Lee Wright. It was Reina Chaos, however, who had a career game, with a remarkable +71 points on 31 jams as a blocker. Rosenwinkel exploited Manic penalties when she could, but she was consistently strong against full-strength blocking as well. She scored  67 total points, taking lead on thirteen of seventeen jams and giving up just 15 points to the opposing jammer. 

 The Manics held the Crossers scoreless for five consecutive jams early in the second half, but they couldn’t make a significant dent in the lead. Playing short-handed much of the second half, the Manics gave up ghost points in 17 jams. Ruth Enasia milked the most out of a power jam in the fifteenth, pulling the Manics to within 10. The Manics filled the box again in the nineteenth, however, and Indy Cent iced the win with a fifteen-point jam.

 In the last regular-season game of 2010 on May 22nd, the Manic Attackers will face a Hell’s Belles team that appears to be catching fire just as the season flames out. The Manics will be looking to avoid following a championship season with a losing record, while the Belles hope to dodge a winless season. The Double Crossers look forward to meeting the Fury, pitting Rosenwinkel against Super Freak Kola Loka. Less than 10 points separate these two jammers at the top of the league scoring standings, and both teams are 4-1. Each is assured a place in the championship game, but there are too many chips on the table at the end of the regular season for either team to check.

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