Freshie Seshie

Ahhh, freshies. One of the things that I love about Freshie Seshie is the fact that we get all these bright, shining, eager faces of people who want to learn how to do derby because they think it rocks. It’s like when you have a pack of puppies and they’re all so excited about everything because everything is new and awesome and let’s all do everything all the time!

Herding new skaters is like herding puppies,
which is slightly easier than herding cats.

 Heh. VDL does a thing where we do a “Freshie Seshie” where we have a session specifically for newbies, who can come and learn the basics of skating for free and borrow gear from league members. Then we have four fresh meat intake sessions after that, where they can try out actual league training before deciding whether or not to commit. We used to do rolling intakes, but that got WAY too hard to manage, so now we have a quarterly intake. It makes administration way easier, because there’s only four times in a year when we have to do batches of insurance and registration stuff. Yep. Streamlining admin is important.

Oh, adorable entry-level skates. Eeeee.

 Anyway, we had our first of the four fresh meat intakes on Tuesday. We had about 20 newbies, which was really exciting. Some had obviously skated before, and some were doing that shuffly thing on wheels that everyone starts out doing. There were enough of us at training such that we could each coach one of the newbies one on one, which was really cool. I got a uni student called E (well, I won’t put her real name here for obvious lack-of-consent and whatever reasons) and she was pretty cool. She went to the Freshie Seshie on Sunday and had been looking at doing derby for over a year, so she was definitely enthusiastic. I took her through basic derby stance, and also falls and stops. We chatted a bit as well, so she knows I’m doing a Ph.D. and I learnt that she really likes Japanese and is going to Japan for a year or something. Also Sarge got me to be his demonstrator for the falls, ha ha ha. Too bad I fucked up the four-pointer because I forgot to keep my head up. Whoops. But otherwise it was good I think. We did basic drills and slaloms, and then there was a free skate at the end.

This is sometimes how I feel around
new skaters. I'm an old fogey.

Admittedly, since I’ve been back at VDL the standard for what freshies have is kind of stupidly impressive. There are whities who can do backwards crossovers (both directions) and people who can do like 30/5 and stuff. It’s crazy. In a kind of self-absorbed way, I’m glad I grew with the league when I did, because I’ve sometimes got a tendency to ragequit when I don’t think that I’m improving enough, or when shitloads of people are better than me at something. :P I think overall it’ll be great for the league to have all these skilled people in it of course, but maybe this is just me being intimidated by newbies or something…

Of course, I didn't really learn much from the training session overall, but there was enough room so I could practice sideways skating, and I need to work more on power slides and tomahawks (I'm still overturning for them). But yeah, it was really cool to see all these new faces rolling around on the track while the more senior skaters all zoomed around them and whatnot. I really like their enthusiasm and the fact that they're so crazy about derby. Yeah, so now I kind of feel like a jaded old fogey (at a whole, what, one year into my skating career) but I like that it reminds me of how I used to be, and the fact that their enthusiasm is kind of infectious.

I found a fantastic "how to" for nooblets here. This is pretty much the stuff we covered at the Freshie Intake. I hope they come back on Sunday. Yay.