Buffalo’s Lake Effect Furies Need to Be Greedy In May
“I go back and look at my career and great teams are always greedy,” Charles Barkley
Rumour has it that after the 5 time WFTDA Champion Gotham Roller Girls decimated the Lake Effect Furies 590–29 at Playoffs last year their Captain Bonnie Thunders entered the team’s dressing room and lectured her team for their lack of focus and effort. The result, a +561 point differential, was their largest ever in sanctioned play, but their veteran jammer wasn’t pleased. She felt her team let up, left points on the track and didn’t play with focus for a full 60 minutes. They didn’t play greedy enough. Gotham would go on to lose in the Championships last year by 11 points, their first loss since 2010.
Playing down to competition is so easy in sports, especially in win-loss atmospheres where good teams can close out games down the stretch after playing poorly for much of a game. Within the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA) teams don’t have this luxury. Rankings are based upon your average WFTDA score over the previous calendar year — that score being your percentage of total points scored in a game, to the power of 3, times the weight of your opponent. Teams that lose focus or let up will suffer in the rankings for not playing complete games. Every single jam of every single sanctioned game counts.
For teams like the Furies this means creating a culture of great habits — skating hard to the penalty box, getting good rest before game days, high attendance at practice and training, studying footage and playing with discipline. For a team that has had a consistent slow build within WFTDA their approach to that culture of habits has been good, but in order to push further they have to be better.
The month of May will present a challenge to those habits. The Furies have 5 bouts in May, Killamazoo at home on the 7th, three bouts at the Beaver Fever Tournament in Kitchener-Waterloo against Calgary, Tri-City and Rideau Valley, and a bout against Green Mountain at home on May 28th to close out their home schedule. After this month they will only have 1 bout left this regular season — an away game against Steel City in Pittsburgh on June 18th. Even a great result against Steel City will be averaged against 13 other bouts. We will know who this team is, and have a good idea of where they will be, at the end of this month.
Making big gains over these 5 bouts will be tough, the highest weight of any of their opponents is 2.39 (Tri City) and the lowest is 1.72 (Green Mt.). Their 2015 playoffs + 2016 calendar year average is 388 so anything below that score will bring their average down by playoffs. Their calendar year average is amazing at 498, but the Furies have to make sure this doesn’t trend downwards and that will be hard against teams with such low weights. Even if they score 100% of the total points against Killamazoo this Saturday — which would mean holding them scoreless — they would only score 534 WFTDA points.
Their last bout against Ithaca in April left some small room for concern of slippage. The team as a whole didn’t have a full game focus and those small habits that are so important weren’t consistent — skaters not skating hard to the penalty box, slow transition into offense, discipline and that overall sense of playing down to an opponent. The Furies 430 WFTDA score against Ithaca was well above their average, but still their lowest of this calendar year. Allowing Ithaca to put up 11 points in the first three jams, and allowing another small run in the 2nd half, really cut at the Furies’ ability to play a complete game. All year they have had long stretches of brilliance, completely holding teams off the score sheet and going on massive runs, but they still haven’t been able to figure out how to sustain that focus for a full half let alone a full game.
The month of May will test all of this as the increased bout schedule means less time for practice, less time to train, and less time to rest injuries and prepare. The Furies have placed themselves in a great position having such a strong start to this season, but there are teams behind them capable of lapping them if they let up and a disastrous month could see them drop down to Division 2 if they are not careful. Take any of the teams they play this month for granted and they will pay for it.
Beyond their own preparation, they are now the hunted for the entire month of May. For every team playing them they will be the highest ranked and highest weighted opponent. Although some are long shots, all of these teams still have playoff hopes and they will all be circling their calendars and preparing for this bout looking to steal points and gain in the rankings.
Last May the Furies kicked off the month with one of their worst bouts of 2015, losing by 12 points in an upset by the lower ranked Tri-City. They rebounded to finish out the Beaver Fever tournament in 2015, but that bout should stick out in their minds as they prepare for their games this month. If they don’t come out with those good habits and focus to each of these bouts, they will risk repeating their mistake this year. They need to win and win convincingly. They need to want it more and they need to be greedy.
