We are super proud to announce that, last weekend, we secured our promotion to Division 2 of the British Roller Derby Championships for next year, following our playoff match against Norfolk on Saturday 10th September.
To recap, we won all 5 of our divisional matches in this year’s championships against Cornwall, Devon, Surrey, Plymouth and Bath, so we needed one victory at playoffs to secure our promotion. Held in Newark, playoffs involved 8 teams from across the country (South, East, West and North groups) playing to win the title of Tier 3 champion for 2016.
The Norfolk Brawds were very co-ordinated in their attack and showed strong offence skills from the start to create opportunities for their jammers to get points on the board and were leading by over 30 points at half time.
However, your beloved Kent staged a remarkable comeback, which began in the first 2 minutes of the second half by drawing a penalty which sent the Norfolk Jammer to the box for 30 seconds.
This gave us a chance to start scoring unhindered and boosted the teams confidence to help wipe away the deficit and then go on to stage a stunning revival and finish the game victorious at 154-138.
Team Captain Jennapocalypse said “I’m so proud KRG is going to be a division 2 team next year. We sat down last year after coming 3rd and decided we wanted to make it playoffs.”
“After missing out on a spot in the 2015 playoffs the team were so focussed and driven that we ended up finishing first in our division, getting to playoffs, and then, winning our promotion match. We really smashed both our expectations and our opponents.”
We played two more games in a knock out round of the tournament, but our winning streak was not to continue with 2 losses on the Sunday, first against Wirral, who were 15 places higher up the rankings (Final score 73-130) and the overall champions on the day, Swansea ranked 22nd (Final score 123-223).
However, it was still an amazing weekend for the team, with such close scores boosting our end of year position on the Flat Track Stats ranking table ahead of our move up to the next tier of play in Division 2.
Feeling inspired? If you’re a female over 18 who wants to learn the game and how to skate, we are holding an open day on 23rd October at the Bay Arena in Herne Bay – see our Facebook event for details.
