Making the team, SCRD style

This week has been good for skating. I had BAD training on Sunday, then on Monday ze boyfriend and I went down to that Skate Area at Golden Gate Park (that I mentioned here--and the same old guy dancing around with the boombox was there). We brought beer cans and used them as cones to do weaving stuff and jumps. And yesterday SCRD had their newbie tryouts (which was part of the reason why we went to the skate area in the first place, to run through the WFTDA minimum skills test and whatnot). Technically I'm visiting/transferring and don't need to do the tryouts, but hey, it was on at regular training time and half of the normal SCRD team were there as well, plus a photographer and a couple of other new faces.

One of the weirdest things was that there was a girl there wearing a full body lycra bodysuit thing. And skates. Well, she didn't have the head bit zipped up, but yeah, it was something like this:

And then she also had her underwear on the outside. WTF? I was curious and wanted to ask, but I didn't. Oh well.


So, the test consisted of:

• 25 in 5 warmup
• Stops (T, Plow)
• Falls (1 point, 2 point, baseballs, 180* 1 points, 4 points)
• 5 in 1 (twice, with a 1-2 min break in between)
• 1-minute planks
• Cutting (going from inside line to outside and back)
• Balancing on one leg on the straightaways (with each leg)
• Another 25 in 5 (which I did in about 4:40, yay)
• The boomerang drill (two skaters skate next to each other on inside line, the insidemost one pushes the other one out to the outside line, and then calls for them to come back in to the inside line. The returning skater comes in behind the other skater and then pushes them out, etc. I totally fucked this one up because I came back in in front of the other skater, and then swore a lot and laughed probably too much for the assessors' liking.)

No jumps, hops, hits, pushes, pace lines with weaving, or whips. A bit sadface, but that's understandable since it's the newbie tyrouts I guess. I guess things like swivel head, posture, crossovers, obstacle avoidance etc. become apparent when you do enough laps with enough people on the track.

But yeah, I qualify. Yay me. And that means tonight there's grownup league training to go to too. I will be onskates four nights this week, and that makes me happy. And because I don't really have photos for this entry, here, have a picture of some baby otters.