Preview: Battle On The Bank III

By Busta Armov, Last updated Fri Jun 25 2010 1:55am

This weekend, the San Diego Derby Dolls host the third annual “Battle On The Bank” (BotB) tournament at the fairgrounds in Del Mar, California. Competition begins Friday, June 25, and continues through Sunday.

Eight teams will compete in double elimination half-games on Friday, June 26 and Saturday, June 27. The final four teams will play full length games on Sunday, June 27 to determine first through fourth place. The event is included with admission to the county fair, and should put the new Kitten Traxx track they completed in January through its paces.

Live video and text coverage of Battle On The Bank III begins at 4pm PDT (7pm EDT) on Friday, June 26, and coverage continues Saturday at 11am PDT, Sunday at 1pm PDT.

The LA and San Diego Derby Dolls, T.X.R.D. Lonestar Rollergirls, Arizona Derby Dames, Red Dirt Rebellion Rollergirls and Team Legit are returning, while this is a first banked track outing for Tilted Thunder Rail Birds of Seattle, who expect to have their own track by the end of next year. San Diego is putting up both its A and B-teams.

Rather than being a team assembled for BotBIII, as they were last year, Team Legit has already played two games against the LA and San Diego Derby Dolls this year in preparation for the tournament. LA squeaked by with a 133-127 win over Legit in March, but San Diego defeated Team Legit with a more substantial 150-110 victory.

In 2008 Team Awesome was the first flat track based team to bring a reality check to the banked track tournament in its first year, and Team Legit has carried that flag since three Team Awesome members joined the San Diego Derby Dolls. The Battle on the Bank III version of Team Legit still has six skaters from Rat City, but also has skaters hailing from Duke City, Denver, Rocky Mountain, Rose City and Detroit.

San Diego defeated the LA Derby Dolls by two points in a last jam nailbiter at last year's Battle on the Bank II: Capital Punishment in Austin. Team Legit took 3rd place with a 76-51 win over the T.X.R.D. Lonestar Rollergirls.

Last year's four top winners all have reasons to want the number 1 spot. San Diego wants to continue being the world's top banked track team. Los Angeles wants to reclaim the title from its little sister league. Team Legit wants to be the first banked track champion that's all flat track skaters (though many have more interleague banked track experience than the skaters from full time banked or banked/flat hybrid leagues. The T.X.R.D. Lonestar Rollergirls, as the original mothers of modern roller derby, would like to claim the title as the matriarch of the entire banked track clan.

Three of the four top teams have already played multiple interleague games against challenging opponents, and they're currently ranking in the exact order in which they placed at last year's Battle on the Bank. While all three teams appear to be playing more strategic and complex derby this year than last, San Diego and Team Legit seemed to have advanced more in their application. Team Legit was a dead match for LA in March, and San Diego proved much stronger than Legit in the second half of their game. There's no gauge for T.X.R.D.'s preparation for this year's game, since they haven't played an interleague game this year against the other three main competitors.

The games will be played using the W.O.R.D. Banked Track Roller Derby Rules version 1.3, which were approved by the three main banked track leagues in January. In last year's BotB in Austin, the rules required a jammer from each team to be played each jam. This led to some controversial results as jammers discovered they could do a major cut to get past, and it would only cost the team a blocker.

Lower Tier

While any team can make it to the top based on the schedule, at this time there's the mesa of the top four teams. The interleague experience level of the remaining four teams makes dramatic Round 1 upsets unlikely. With the Tilted Thunder Rail Birds, Arizona Derby Dames, Red Dirt Rebellion and the San Diego Derby Dolls B-team up against SDDD's A-Team, T.X.R.D., Team Legit and LADD respectively, prevailing against those odds is a significant challenge. The highest position the losers in Round 1 can contend for is 3rd place, assuming they prevail in Round 2.

AZDD came up 2-0 in its games against Red Dirt in 2009. The first was a significant spread with 139-70, AZDD; the second was a much tighter 69-67 AZDD win. Since then, AZDD has built it's own Kitten Traxx track (specifications identical to the San Diego, LADD and Red Dirt tracks). Both leagues have brought in outside trainers, and have grown significantly in the interim, so last year's results might not be indicative of future performance. Tilted Thunder's training and preparation are complete unknowns (though there are informal ties with at least one of Seattle's flat track leagues), and San Diego's B-team has the advantage of training similar to their A-team. Tilted Thunder is the only league/team that has no banked track game experience at the tournament, but that didn't really slow down Team Awesome in its banked track debut.

Rosters follow on second page.