It’s very rare in competitive sports these days that you find a showing of unity. You wouldn’t find Aston Villa holding a joint training session with Arsenal for example, but that just shows what the power of Derby Love is all about, as a large chunk of The London Rollergirls uprooted to Birmingham for the day to spend a morning training with The Central City Rollergirls.
The Cocks Moors Woods leisure centre was our destination, and after an evening in a decidedly dodgy hotel in the city centre (the rooms even had a random window in the porchway, which we can only assume was to screen your room for axe murderers) we stumbled through the confusing Birmingham suburbs.

The LRG’s Bette Noir led training, and started off with some speed skating, so when all the girls split into groups according to speed no one was too sure exactly which group they belonged in! Things soon settled down, and when every CCR girl paired with each LRG girl for blocking drills, everyone had an idea of who might best match their own skill level.
Then it was time to get down to the nitty gritty of scrimmaging. Some offensive and defensive scrimmaging drills saw some fantastic teamwork coming out from players who’d never met each other, let alone played with each other before. Belle DeBrawl and Ouija Broad were making walls at the front of the pack like old friends, and Fox Sake and Hustle’her showed some excellent communication between each other.

The allotted practice time came to an end far too quickly for anyone’s liking, so of course, there was only one way to continue this. The Pub!

We would like to thank CCR for having us and we can’t wait to meet you guys on the track for real!

BigCatMerv, London Rollergirls announcer.

Pics to follow!