Feeding the baby

Okay, so we all know that eating the baby is when the jammer gets reabsorbed into the pack. Well, here's a strategy that banks on that, and also uses a lot of new skills and stuff. I'm not sure how I feel about this as a strategy just yet, because I think it'd be kinda hard to pull off, but anyway.

So the idea is that you induce a situation where the jammer gets absorbed by the pack. This is done basically by hitting the jammer out at the beginning of the jam, and then skating backwards to about turn 2 or something. The jammer that is hit out would have to follow you back to reenter behind you (or else get a cut). So this is what happens:

At the start, you have your packs as follows. Blue jammer hits yellow jammer out of bounds. Blue jammer skates backwards (or turns around and skates forwards, whatever) to about turn 2.

If Yellow Jammer doesn't catch on fast enough and just reenters, then she's cutting and that's a major right off the bat. But if she takes the bait (as it were), she can skate around the outside to reenter behind the blue jammer.

However, if the pack is moving, then Blue Jammer can make the Yellow Jammer reenter right between her and the pack:
 

I got tired of doing the individual skaters for the pack, so now they are giant blobs.

At the same time, if the Blue Blockers are slowly skating forward then the gap that yellow jammer should be reentering in is between the blue jammer and the blue blockers. So as yellow jammer approachers, blue jammer skates forward and yellow jammer reenters and gets immediately absorbed by the pack:

 

I call this "feeding the baby" because you're basically bringing the baby to the pack, as it were. But when we were trying this, it was contingent on a lot of things.

Firstly, the yellow jammer doesn't need to follow the blue one. She could just stand on the side of the track and not reenter until the blue jammer skates past her. Which, presumably she wouldn't do because that would defeat the purpose of the play. But that in itself is a good strategy for blue if they want to count down the clock, e.g. if they have blockers in the bin and are waiting for them to come back.


Have a look at what happens in this bout, around 16:30:

But, of course, the pack is (slowly) rolling forward so if the red blockers had taken off sooner the red jammer would have had less time. But this is pretty much the strategy that's being employed here.

However, then that means both jammers are both one down on their initial pass, so you'd have to skate a lap (since the pack is almost by turn 3 at this stage) and then skate another lap for your initial pass. That sounds tiring to me, and it might not be worth the energy. It might work well if you have a really slow opposing jammer or something but then that also assumes they are taking the bait, and their bench might be just screaming at them not to or something.

I guess the benefits for doing this would be to chance that the opposing (hit out) jammer would force the track cut, thereby making it pretty much a power jam, or she'll be so eaten that this jam basically guarantees no points for the opposition. And if she didn't take the bait then that counts down a lot of time too.

But yeah, this looks like a play to keep your eyes peeled for...