As always, we encourage you to please review the DNN Power Rankings FAQ before you invest a lot of angst and bile in berating us for what you perceive as our obvious ignorance :)
Derby News Network Power Rankings - May 2009
After three months of very animated debates on disagreements, the most recent ranking process was a welcome relief -- the DNN crew arrived at almost identical conclusions, and the remaining reconciliation took less than five minutes. While fairly stable due to few April upsets, May's DNN Power Rankings do feature the notable first inclusion of a league that is not a member of WFTDA.
A few areas were fuzzier than we'd like them to be, mostly carrying over from last month's
areas of concern:
Carolina's placement relative to Charm City and Boston
We're a little more confident in our ordering of these three teams than we were in April, particularly given Charm City's notably better performance against Gotham than Boston was able to manage. Carolina's a little trickier, as recent bout results still only allow us to indirectly compare them to Boston by way of matchups with Philly.
While our consensus position of Boston over Carolina differs from the WFTDA Quarterly Ranking released earlier this week, we don't want you to take this too seriously -- it's really just about impossible to decisively rank Boston and Carolina against each other, but we'll get an indisputable solution when they face each other at the East Coast Derby Extravaganza.
East vs. West
Based on recent results, each of these two WFTDA regions has a very tight cluster just below the top tier. In the East, it's Charm City, Boston, and Carolina; in the West, a bare handful of points separate Oly, Denver, Rose City, and Rat City. Because they've been bouting within the clusters, we've been able to do suitable ordering for each cluster. Because the clusters haven't intersected in about a year, we're not so sure where they are in relationship to each other.
We'll get a hint in May, as Rocky Mountain (sitting a little below the West cluster) travels to Boston for a bout on the 16th. For a better read, though, we'll have to wait for ECE in June.
San Diego Derby Dolls debut at #17
As was the case with Oly one month ago, we've long suspected that San Diego was playing at a Power-Rankable level, but they'd yet to persuade a ranked team to play them in order to establish their standing empirically. April's 6-point loss to #13 Duke City provided the yardstick we'd been waiting for.
Exactly where to place them based on that result was a little more difficult to resolve, in no small part because both teams had to struggle with the extremely slippery polished concrete floor at the Santa Ana Star Center, Duke City's new home. While both teams expressed satisfaction with the result and the highly competitive experience, they're also actively discussing prospects for a rematch on a less treacherous bouting surface.
In the final calculation, we factored San Diego's evident adaptability (as displayed in their second-half comeback run leading to a last-jam nailbiter) against our past experiences with other ranked teams, and slotted them in at the level we believe they're competing at. We'd love to be able to rank them more precisely, but we need San Diego bout resuilts before we can do so. Teams currently in the teens, we're looking at you meaningfully when we say this.
While WFTDA recently denied San Diego's membership application due to incompatibilities between the league's business structure and WFTDA's membership requirements, SDDD is definitely playing a solid, competitive game of WFTDA-standard roller derby. We look forward to seeing them in action in the future.
Honorable Mentions
By popular demand, we're including a brief discussion of teams that we think are just on the bubble:
- Providence - Once ranked as high as #9 nationally by WFTDA, Providence has had a rough year. Last weekend's defeat of April's #25 Harrisburg puts them back on our radar.
- Harrisburg - Power Ranked in March and April, Harrisburg gets doubly bumped this month by San Diego's debut and the loss to Providence.
- Steel City - Pummeled Dutchland mercilessly to extend a solid winning streak, but needs a solid performance against someone currently ranked to really get our attention.
- North Star - They've racked up a win streak beating other unranked teams, but like Steel City, they'll need to aim a little higher to break back into DNN's top 25.
- Dallas - Another previously ranked team that's about one impressive result away from returning to the countdown.
- Atlanta - While they've suffered recent losses to Steel City and Dallas, Atlanta's bout schedule seems calculated to provide good advancement and learning opportunities, such as this weekend's Saturday/Sunday adventure to Houston and Austin, respectively.
- L.A. Derby Dolls - One of a handful of leagues to successfully house, build, and bout on a banked roller derby track, L.A. also seems to recognize that sport is about competition, and there's vastly more competition available on the flat track with the WFTDA ruleset used by 95% of modern derby leagues. Given their "kid sister" San Diego's performance this month, we'll be watching L.A. very closely in The Big One tournament in May.
As always, we welcome your thoughtful, vigorous, and courteous discussion over on the rankings page.
Kids today are all about hugging and solving their problems via choreographed dance routines. But when I was a kid, we settled our differences in the place where wheeled dreams come true: the 
Skatetown, U.S.A. "From coast to coast, rock and roller disco is the most!"
Roller Boogie: "It's love on wheels!"
Xanadu: "A million lights are dancing, and there you are, a shooting star."
Vaughn Mason & Crew: Roller Skate "Girl, I want to skate with you."
The Dolly Dots: Rollerskating "It's just like a disco, but it's more than a disco, they are skaaaating!"
