Breaking the pack

So because of the awesome efforts of the executive and training committee at NRV and VDL, I was cleared for scrimmaging even though I haven't done my WFTDA test yet. Eeeee! Scrimmaging takes place at the end of the training, and I was pumped for it. But because I am awesome I happened to hurt my crotch hip flexor at training doing a hockey stop, so I decided to sit out scrimmaging. Boo. :( But I did learn some things about pack-breaking from Goliath while I was watching.

Basically, the thing to do these days is scrum starts. That is, you've got your jammers on the jammer line, and then your blockers are pretty much lined up on the jammer line as well. And one team will take a knee right on the jammer line to release the jammers right away, since if one team is on their knees you've got no pack.

In this AWESOME diagram, K= knee start:

In this case, Blue is forcing a no pack and the
jammers are released immediately.

But then you can also have no pack if the pack is split. So if everyone is at the jammer line in the scrum start and one blocker skates to the pivot line, the pack is split, and the jammers are released. (Of course, then that blocker will need to skate back to reform the pack, but still, a no pack.)

Red blocker has split the pack, so there is no pack, and
the jammers are released immediately.

However, if everyone is on the jammer line and a blocker goes to split the pack, and then a second blocker (at the jammer line, on the same team) takes a knee, then the second blocker has broken the pack and gets majored for it.

I couldn't convey "you shouldn't do this" so I wrote "Boo" instead.

 
Basically it seems that the moral is that either your whole team has to be at the jammer line and on their knee, or someone has to be on the pivot line and everyone is on their feet, but not some weird combination of both.


I'm pretty bad at derby strategy, so even getting my head around this took about 20 minutes. And I'm not sure I got it right. But maybe when I scrim on Tuesday I can actually be part of this and it'll make more sense.