NSO...K

NSOing wasn't so bad. Specifically, penalty tracking wasn't so bad, and I didn't lose my shit or fuck it up or anything.

My whistle is still not bout-tested. Sadface.

We had to get to the skate centre at 4:30 to set up and be briefed, and then doors opened at 5:30 for the 6pm bout. We didn't have our NSO briefing until about 5:15 or 5:30 so it was pretty stressful because until the bout started I didn't have any idea what the fuck I was doing. Plus it turned out that the other penalty tracker wasn't there, so there was a moment when there was a possibility I'd be penalty tracking for both teams and I almost shit my pants. I was worried about doing it for one team, but two? WTFF?! I almost had a hernia. Luckily, we got someone to pen track for the other team, so we were each only doing one. And the penalty wrangler had experience with pen tracking and explained it to us, so it wasn't that bad.

The first couple of jams were fucking confusing. You have to do all the following at the same time:

• Mark on the sheet when a skater has a penalty the following things: what penalty, major/minor, which jam it was.
• Check these with the inside whiteboard person.
• Check with the outside whiteboard people for extra penalties.
• Check all of this with the penalty wrangler.
• Let the penalty wrangler know when someone is on 3 minors or 6 majors.
• Tell your jam ref how many minors your current jammer has.
• Try not to get run over by skaters/refs.

Also, you should mark off the number of the jam on the bottom of the tracking sheet to keep yourself up to date with which jam it is, mark off penalties when you get 4 minors/7 majors and then run after the refs and tell them to send people off, which can be hard because everyone is shouty all the time.

The bout layout was also something I wasn't used to. It looked something like this:

In this picture, the big green thing on the left is the scoreboard, the green circles are outside whiteboard, the little green thing in the middle of the track is the inside whiteboard, and the purple thing is the bin. The pink and blue things are the team benches, so they had 10 chairs (5 a side, back to back) and that's how they did their lineups. The yellow spot is pretty much where all the audience was. I guess that way you have audience on three sides of the track, which gives more people more trackside viewing.

But that also meant that the inside of the track had two teams, their coaches, the jammer refs, the pack refs and 4 NSOs all clusterfucking in one pretty small area. Luckily, our penalty wrangler was really good and could relay us info without us having to wander too far, but I really wish that the coach for the other team sometimes would STFU. Like, we couldn't hear the ref calls because he was busy swearing at the refs, or yelling unhelpful stuff like "Go [team name]" or something like that. Anyway, there was a bit of douchiness but whatever. It just made my job harder though, so bleh.

Anyway, I did feel better when the bout was over, although I barely got to pay attention to anything that actually happened in it since I had to keep looking at bits of paper and whiteboards. But it was good experience and not as traumatic as I thought.

The one picture I took at the afterparty was during the first
time they played Gangnam Style. Of course.

Also NRV won the bout 182-173, and the afterparty was fun because I ate half a plate of chili cheese fries, introduced people here to a shot that doesn't exist in the US, took photos, got lots of beers and danced to Gangnam Style. It was good, and that made me happy. Also I got to drink on a Sunday night. Yeah.