Victoria roller derby star heading to France with Team Canada
Roller derby may not be an Olympic sport, but it has a world championship – and one Victoria junior skater is going to compete in it this year.
Naomi Morrell, also known as "Scream Soda," is the captain of Victoria's junior roller derby team, the Rotten Apples.
In November, Morrell travelled to Red Deer, Alta., to try out for Canada's national junior roller derby team.
Scream Soda faced off against 50 of the best skaters in Canada.
"I was terrified," she said.
But she made the team.
"Her father and I are very proud of her, but not surprised," said her mom, Cindy MacDougall.
Morrell's roller derby dreams had a storybook start about five years ago.
"I got this comic for Christmas. It was called 'Roller Girl,'" said Morrell. "It's about this little girl who joins roller derby."
Morrell would go on to trade her paperback for a pair of skates, and Scream Soda was born.
"I saw these women and non-binary people just demolishing each other on skates," she said.
Roller derby is a bit like rugby, where players score points by dodging players and making it into their defended zones.
Scream Soda is one part battering ram, one part ballerina, and her teammates love her.
The Rotten Apples junior roller derby team is shown. (CTV News)"She's a bundle of joy," said one of her Rotten Apples teammates.
"She got me this necklace," said another, noting that Morrell is the type of team captain that remembers your birthday.
Now that Scream Soda has made the national team, she'll be heading to France in July to join Canada at the Junior Roller Derby World Cup.
She's on the hook for travel costs though, so her friends and family are pitching in with bottle drives and other fundraisers.
A GoFundMe was set up for Morrell and had raised more than $3,400 of its $5,000 goal by Thursday.
Morrell is the only Vancouver Island player to make the national team, and is just one of three players from B.C., according to the online fundraiser.
CTVNews.ca Top Stories
Parents of infant who died in wrong-way crash on Ontario's Hwy. 401 were in same vehicle
Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit has released new details about a wrong-way collision in Whitby on Monday night that claimed the lives of four people.
Three Quebec men from same family father hundreds of children
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
B.C. mayor stripped of budget, barred from committees over Indigenous residential schools book
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
OPP's mandatory alcohol screening during traffic stops 'not acceptable': CCLA
A spike in impaired driving-related collisions has caused Ontario’s provincial police to begin enforcing mandatory alcohol screening (MAS) at all traffic stops in the Greater Toronto Area -- a move one civil rights group says is ‘not acceptable.’
Auston Matthews to miss second straight playoff game with Toronto Maple Leafs facing elimination
Auston Matthews will miss the Maple Leafs' must-win Game 6 against the Boston Bruins.
Jurors in Trump hush money trial hear recording of pivotal call on plan to buy affair story
Jurors in the hush money trial of Donald Trump heard a recording Thursday of him discussing with his then-lawyer and personal fixer a plan to purchase the silence of a Playboy model who has said she had an affair with the former president.
Southern Alberta store broken into by burly black bear
Staff at a small southern Alberta office supply store were shocked to find someone had broken into the business last week, but they were even more confused when they discovered the culprit was a bear.
Captain sentenced to 4 years for criminal negligence in fiery deaths of 34 aboard scuba boat
A federal judge on Thursday sentenced a scuba dive boat captain to four years in custody and three years supervised release for criminal negligence after 34 people died in a fire aboard the vessel.
New scam targets Canada Carbon Rebate recipients
Fake text message and email campaigns trying to get money and information out of unsuspecting Canadian taxpayers have started circulating, just months after the federal government rebranded the carbon tax rebate the Canada Carbon Rebate.