2015 was a big year for Rainy City. All 3 of our teams played lots of home games and won plenty too. We held approximately 14 sell-out bootcamps, more than 10 open skate sessions, around 48 new skater training lessons and even held our own gallery exhibition!
New Skater training began on the 12th of January and we welcomed in a whole new batch of skaters, including some from the year before. We trained them and built them up and saw our C-Team, the Bet Lynch Mob (BLM), grow in numbers and in strength. In 2014 we didn’t have enough skaters on BLM for them to bout, but in 2015 we had so many new skaters that they had 2 home games with full rosters and subs. Their first ever game, against North Cheshire Victory Rollers, was such a good game to watch. The rest of the league and our fans sat on the sideline in awe as we watched our newest skaters win their first game.
BLM grow in training every week and watching them at scrim is one of our favourite things, hopefully this year we can watch them win more games and move up in the rankings even more.
It was another big year for the Tender Hooligans as well. They played in a weekend tournament, an away game, a Sur5al and held 6 home games! Our B-Team saw themselves rise in the rankings from around 130th in Europe to 65th.
In 2015 the Travel Team did indeed travel, they went all the way to the USA to showcase the strength of UK roller derby. They played against a whole host of teams, but I think the league most vividly remembers them playing against Gotham’s Wall Street Traitors. Most of us stayed up until 3am to watch the live Twitter feed on a school night! They played and won many games at home as well, and we saw them get back into the top 10 in Europe (the Tender Hooligans are catching up).
As a league we massively grew in numbers, we had transfers from all across the UK (and beyond). It could have been because of our new nationwide fame. Some of our skaters, and our beautiful Thunderdome, starred in a roller derby documentary Roller Derby: Skate Fast, Hit Hard on BBC iPlayer which I’m sure you’ve all seen. Following our new found fame we were also invited down to London to appear on The One Show!
We’ve got loads of exciting things lined up for this year already and we’re hoping for another year as good as the last. Our A-Team are planning another trip the USA, we already have bootcamps planned and sold out and we are looking forward to opening our doors back up for new skater night on the 11th January.
See you in 2016!
