The start

So, welcome to my blog. I’ve been meaning to write a blog for a while now, so I guess now I will (probably because this is actually a fit of procrastination, but whatevs).

I’ve been skating for about 4 months now, maybe. A couple of girls at my university started a league at the beginning of the year because the only other league in town (Canberra Roller Derby League) had like a 400-person waiting list or something. I’m on their mailing list, and they are having tryouts in November.

I’ve wanted to do derby for a while, even before I bought my first pair of skates and whatnot. I lived in the US a few years ago and derby was just taking off there when I was leaving. And then I went to the premiere of “Whip It” (NOTE: not the actual movie, just the fancy premiere thingy) at the Toronto International Film Festival. And they had a flat-track derby bout thing in the middle of Dundas Square (which, for those of you who don’t know, is a big square right in the middle of the downtown area). It was pretty awesome. To the untrained eye it seriously just looked like a bunch of women skating around in a circle and punching each other or something. So I thought that looked pretty cool. Then, back in Canberra, the then-boyfriend and I went to a bout between the Canberra all-star Vice City Rollers and the ladies from Sydney RDL in December. It was pretty epic. He was really into it, and when I managed to understand the rules I was like, “oh yeah, this is pretty cool”. I used to play hockey, and to some extent this had the same kind of fast-and-violent disposition about it that I liked.

That night all we could talk about was what my derby name would be. I wanted something that would suggest that I was small and fast, so I picked “Pocket Rocket”. Yep. (Later, I would find out that was taken, and I went through like 6 names before I settled on my current one. Gah. Picking a derby name is hard!)

I liked my first session so much that I wore my skates at work for a week.

And then I procrastinated for like 4 whole months wondering if I could actually do derby. Then one day the then-boyfriend (henceforth TBF) and I were walking across campus and we saw a bunch of people learning how to skate in the courtyard in the middle of the campus. And I was like, “yeah, I can do that”. So I jumped on their mailing list, and lo and behold I found out that they were doing a mass fresh meat purchase from Sydney Derby Skates with a huge discount. I love huge discounts. I managed to squeeze in a late order and then next week I had my awesome Riedell Diablos, and all the padding I could ever want. My friend McSmack skates with CRDL, and she came to our session too. It was probably WAY too basic for her, but it was nice to have someone there that I actually knew. :)

Anyway, I can’t really remember too much about what happened in those early days. There were only a handful of us, and we were being trained by Marie Slamtoinette from Central Coast Roller Girls. Marie had to leave CCRG because she moved to Canberra. Then, a newspaper article went out about how we had our own league and way more people joined, including Drool Sergeant, who is like a proper derby coach guy and actually used to train the CRDL girls. So that was a bit of a scoop. Sarge still trains us and Marie now trains the noobs a bit. There’s also a whole bunch of other people from those early days who have stuck around that I could talk about, but I’m sure that will come out in other entries.