When I started at VDL, Pitts (who was then-President of the league) introduced a new term: lurby. It's supposed to be some portmanteau of "derby love". I'm not a huge fan of the spelling but whatever, the idea is that you have love not just for roller derby itself, but those who play it, and those who enable you to be able to be part of it.
Sometimes we all need a bit more lurby. Every league goes through some drama where there's some internal squabbling over something or another. But in doing so we sometimes lose sight of what matters, and then people get angry and frustrated, and then they cry and walk away.
I've already written a whole giant blog entry about derby drama. I'm not going into that again. But when I was recently back in Australia and skating with VDL, I noticed that they had a new tradition to counteract the problems that came with politics and drama. Basically, at the end of each practice session, all the skaters--regardless of their skill levels or who they were--sat down in a circle while they were taking their gear off, and each went around and said who they had lurby for based on that session. So you might say that you have lurby for a freshie who has just nailed a new skill, or for a coach for an awesome session, or whatever it is. But it was a good way to bring everyone together at the end and just refocus on the important stuff, which is the fact that we are all in it together.
P.S. The awesome Derby Love ring showed above is available at I heart roller derby. Squee!
Wow! I haven't updated this for a while. Sorry. Anyway, a LOT has happened since my last entry. I spent three weeks back in Australia, did my Ph.D. graduation (for which I deliberated wearing skates, but there was carpet and LOTS of stairs, plus I wasn't sure how wearing a giant robe on wheels would work without eating shit), went to a bunch of derby practices and did an awesome epic lake skate with Boudi. Actually, when I was in Canberra, the things I did the most pretty much was all skate related (even though I also had graduation and a conference to go to, I managed to wrangle a lake skate, skate shopping, social skate with CRDL and a few VDL practices. It turned out that I got to do something skatey pretty much every day. Yay).
I learned a lot while I was away, and in the next few weeks I'll be doing a bunch of posts about particular things that I saw work well at other leagues, new drills I learned, and whatnot. Keep your eyes peeled!
This is a really simple trick to practice transitions without even
really thinking about it! We used to do this at VDL when we were learning transitions, and I introduced it to some of the skaters at NRV tonight and they liked it, hooray! I call it Dirty Dancing Transitions for want of a better name, but you have to maintain lots of eye contact as you do moves together, and the transitioning looks like something they could do if Dirty Dancing was done on skates.
Now I've had the time of my life No I never felt like this before
With a partner, start facing each other, not
too far apart, maybe like 15-20 feet (depending on how much speed you
want to do this at). Skate towards each other (1), and look each other in
the eye. Maintain eye contact as you pass each other and turn around (2), so you end up skating backwards (3).
Red arrows indicate the direction you're skating in.
I should really work on my paint skills.
This means that you'll both end up transitioning, and because you're not focusing on your feet, the transitions will come naturally and quickly. You can also check to see if your transitions are working well, if you
turn around and your partner is directly across from you, not veering off to the
side.
Remember to practice transitioning on both sides--if you have a bad side, try to partner up with someone who also has that as their bad side so you can both work on transitioning on that side at the same time.
As you both get better at it, you can increase your speed.
...I am finally on a roster for a bout I will actually get to bout.
Yes.
So, last night I had a dream that I was buying warpaint for derby, and then today the roster went out for NRV's B team bout against the Blackwater Rollers. Coincidence? I think not. (Yes, I have dreams about derby. I often hipcheck Ze Boyfriend in my sleep.)
Okay, so I've been on rosters before. At VDL, I had been drafted to both the Cheerbleeders and the Dishonour Rollers, but I never actually got to do their bouts since I was overseas or injured. I did the CRDL Scrimmage (which was terrifying at the time because I had NO idea what I was doing) and I also did the mini-bouts at Season's Beatings last year.
But this upcoming bout will be my first proper bout with a team that I actually am in a league with. I will get a jersey with my name on it, and I will get to hit people in the name of my league. These things matter; it means that I'm not such a late bloomer after all (although I admit I was getting worried that if I didn't have any bouting experience and I had been skating for years, people might think there was something wrong with me).
It also will be the first time I get to do a rollout. Yay!
Varsity Derby League took on the Blue Mountains Roller Derby League last night in their first travel bout of the season, and they won 244-168. I has a proud. :D
Of course, because of the time difference, I was getting the updates much after the fact. But if you check out VDL's facebook page you can see how it all went down. It looked like a pretty close bout.
In other news, I'll hopefully start bouting with the NRV B team in March, when they have their first away bout against Blackwater!
My VDL peeps are currently at the Gold Coast for Rollercon (eeee!) and I'm still slowly getting off the munted list. My fingers are still borked but at least I can sit down now. In the meantime, I have some new wheels to play with and I'm figuring out things like configurations and whatnot for them. In retrospect I probably should also have got some new bearings as well. Oh well.
Anyway, we're in the tail end of the year and a bunch of things are happening. I'm heading to practice this week for the first time in a month (after muntings and hospital visits). I'll also have new wheels and stuff, and WFTDA skills test is on next week at NRV, and then it's off to Season's Beatings! I'm listed to play in three bouts (the three newbie ones) and hopefully I won't suck too much. The roster is up here. I also did it so I wouldn't have to bring a bunch of different colored shirts, heh. Gritz is driving up and I am rooming with her which should be fun. I haven't been on the road with NRV before so I'm kind of excited about this (since they do a bit of travel to bout other people, so getting some experience with that this year before I bout with them will be good). Also, afterparty and whatnot.
Anyway, I have to admit I am a bit nervous because some of newbie people actually ARE bouting now and stuff and I'm still being crap and not drafted to a team. But we'll see how it goes; all I want is to not get mega injured or whatever.
One year ago today, while I was drunkenly running around at my birthday party, Boudi and I got derby married. I wrote about it here at the time. So yeah, now it is our wedding anniversary, haha. We have both come a long way in derbyland this past year, what with rolling around at the gym right when VDL started (hell, even before it was called VDL) and now between us we've skated with like over 8 leagues and learned a whole bunch of mad skillz.
Okay, I'm not going to be all like reminiscing like an old fogey right now (although we both ARE founding members of Team Nanna, and I just realized that there is no Team Nanna superpower of talking about what happened when I was your age or the olden days or something) but my wife is amazeballs and I like the fact that we are such an awesome derby couple. I think part of that is because we also have similar interests outside of derby so we can also support each other there as well, which is all good. Anyway, check out this awesome present I got her (since she was the one who had to propose to me last time, I felt it was only right that I also showered her with gifts and whatnot):
And it is sparkly and red!
It's cute; it's like those little necklace charms you have when you're 12 years old with your best friend or whatever. I have the left half and I sent the right half to Boudi. I was talking to RayWoWW about derby wives a while ago at practice here; she's a transfer skater also so her wife is out on the other side of the country or something and she was like "I'm the husband in the derby wife relationship" since her wife is the one who does everything or whatever. Ha. I think I'm kind of like that too. But I was inspired by her for the helmet decal; that was her wedding present from her wife when they got married.
I haven't put it on my helmet yet (partially because I don't know where to put it on my helmet given my helmet is covered with other stuff) but I'll have to put a picture of it here when I do. And I can get Boudi to take a picture of her helmet with her half on it or something and maybe we can smash our helmeted heads together and make the decal line up or something in the future. Ha. Anyway the whole point of this post is that my wife is amazeballs. Hoorah.
So back at VDL there was a bout yesterday. This was their second bout ever, and with almost full benches! I'm so proud of my ladies there. Apparently it was also a super close game, which makes it all the more awesome.
Eventually the Cheerbleeders won 213 - 191 over the PhDemons, but at half time the Demons were in the lead. I'm not sure if they do MVPs or whatnot, but hey, from the pictures it looked like there was some ass kickery going on (and no reported muntings, hooray). It's weird because of the people that skated in the bout yesterday, less than half of them were in my cohort and there are fewer people that I know there. It's a bit sad, but hey I'm over here having a proud, so whatevs.
Normally, it's <3)~ (as in the emoticon mouse). However, because of WFTDA rules, you can't use symbols in a derby number, so it's usually just 3. But NRV already has a 03, 3 and 3X on their team, so FUCK. But also hooray that they are even considering this, which suggests that I might get to bout soon and have someone yell out something other than "3"--of course, there's no guarantee that I'll remember and respond to the new number; I might accidentally go off to the bin when whoever actually IS #3 gets majored because my brain is stupid. Blargh.
But yeah, new number. Poo. I really like the mouse. I'm the only person that has that of the 65,000+ names on 2E, and it's obviously suited to the name. It's also an emoticon thingy, which is super geeky, and I like that too. But it'll have to go, and that means I'll need to replace it with something else, even if it's just while I'm skating with NRV.
For the record, Facebook didn't like my derby number either when I tried to change my name about a year ago.
Anyway, so I need a new number. Gritz suggested 131, because it kind of looks like the mouse now, but that's a mouse with a squashed face. Also because the font on my scrim tank makes it look like that.
Others have suggested more 3s, like 33 or 333 or 3333. (Haha, at VDL we had a 33, 333, 13 and 303, and once we were ALL on the track at the same time, and that was just fucking confusing and hilarious.)
For practical reasons, I'm also considering 7777, because that would be the longest possible thing to say for a ref, and so it would give me more time on the track before I got binned while they were trying to read out the entire number and what I was getting binned for.
My favorite so far is 100. I'm fucking Chairman Mouse, and Mao has a famous speech where he say:
"Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought
contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the
sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land."
Or, when poorly translated into English, "let 1000 flowers bloom"--how the fuck do you fuck up numbers so badly in translation? (Oh but maybe 1000 is also an option for a number because if they read out the individual numbers that would give me an extra zero). Of course, this was during the Great Leap Forward, and the 100 flowers campaign was used to tell dissidents that they could speak against their government, and then they were subsequently arrested and probably executed. So I don't know if I'd want to be going down that path.
Other suggestions welcome!
Here's what 1000 flowers blossoming looks like, assholes.
UPDATE: I considered 40,000,000 (as the number of people that died under Mao's regime) but I think that's inappropriate. Also it won't fit on my arm. But imagine if the refs had to read out all the individual zeroes!
Last weekend it was BAD, and this weekend is all about reppin' VDL and the Dishonour Rollers:
I think I am trying to look fierce but I just
look disgusted and many-chinned.
My time at VDL was relatively short and while it was in its infancy; I never did any bouts (they all happened while I was overseas), and the only thing I did that was remotely representative was be on the DishRollers team for the Cannery Challege interleague scrimmage last year. That was already a big deal. But now VDL has sent a team to a FUCKING TOURNAMENT and are actually doing more bouts than they have EVER done before in one weekend.
The final score was CRDL C 155 to VDL's 151. But that's the closest margin we've EVER had. I bet everyone there is over the moon about it. At this rate they'll probably win their next game! And definitely the afterparty. Oh god I wish I was at the afterparty.
It's taken time but the team has needed it to come together, I guess. I know I'm not part of it anymore, but it is awesome to see people who have been just starting out a few months ago make it onto the rep team and kick some ass. It's like seeing the baby league all grown up and dishing out some awesome smackdown of its own. Dawwww.
Anyway, I am in particular extremely proud of my awesome derby wife, who captained the Rollers this time around. About a year ago, we were just rolling around and being freshies who were shitty about failing white star tests and not getting put in the same cohort as people who we started with but were better than us. But fuck, she's now the freaking captain of the travel team! And she went in as a triple threat. A year ago, Boudi wrote a blog post about how much she wanted to get to the point where she could bout. She said:
I want to be a bouting derby skater. I want to be able to tear up the
track as a kickarse jammer. I want to be a great blocker, able to give
the kind of hits that silence the crowd. I want to be a pivot who seems
to have eyes in the back of her head. I want to be really good at this
amazing amazing sport, and I want it so badly I could burst. The idea
that I might not be capable of it is heartbreaking.
But now she is all that, and more. So in a way, ERRD's not just like "yay she made it onto the travel team and is the captain", but it is much more "yay, she kicked a lot of ass to get there, and all that effort and learning has paid off, and she is far more than capable of all of this." She is a fucking inspirational superstar.
Look how far you can come in a year of derby. It makes me so proud right now. Okay, I may or may not have something in my eye.
And that goes for everyone on the team. You've come a long way. I am so fucking proud of you all.
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.
The little skate icons are so we know what we're going to do,
in case we forget.
Yay my derby wife and I are reunited! Boudi was on the other side of the country doing research and stuff and then she came and visited me! We've only got a few days together before she heads to Tucson so we've been doing some serious catchup and skatey things. Yay. Because I am a little bit overexcited and/or OCD, I made her a list of awesome things to do, which was going to optimally cover skating things and also eating lots of awesome food.
Anyway, we started with Mexican food in the Mission before hitting up Cruz Skate Shop. Motley remembered who I was, and asked how the Antiks were going. I showed her the scar on my foot from the super gross blister I got earlier this year. And I needed new wrist guards, so she recommended some things. I now have the new Triple Eight RD Wrist Guards, which I'll do a product review for later after I've had a bit of a go on them. But yeah, Boudi got new wrist guards too, so now we are matchies. And then we went and did some touristy stuff like go to Muir Woods and stuff, and then it was time for a skate!!
Neither of us had skated for a while so we wanted to hit up somewhere flat and away from cars and pedestrians for a bit of a skate first, so we went to the skate area at Golden Gate Park. Happily, Old-guy-with-the-boombox was there, doing spins on his front wheels and toe stops (seriously, wtf, I want to learn how to do that even if it has absolutely NO use in derby). We skated a bunch there and caught up on little tips and skills we had learned from our time away with other leagues. Between us, we've skated with like eight leagues or something. Boudi had this really cool tip about hopping onto your toe stops when you're pushed out of bounds, instead of falling/stopping and then coming back into play. It saves a bunch of time in a jam, but I think I need more practice skating fast and then popping onto my toe stops and turning around. I also got to scuff/break in my new kneepads (which also are due for a product review), which was nice.
We then decided to be more adventurous and skate in the park. We were on the sidewalks and didn't have much of a problem with outdoor skating (except for a part which was slightly hilly but had also been watered lately so it was slick), and we went to the California Academy of Sciences and skated around the Music Concourse out the front of it. It's pretty and flat, and apart from some old men and a little girl on roller skates with her family, it was empty. Yay, more skate!
Me, Boudi and Francis' Butt.
There was a fountain and some circular paths, and we did some continual crossing for a bit around a statue of Francis Scott Key, who was the guy who wrote the Star Spangled Banner. He has his own statue with all the verses around it, haha. It was pretty fun, and it's on a hill looking down over the rest of the concourse and it's all pretty and whatnot. Then we headed to the end of the concourse, where the bowl was, and it actually said NO SKATING on the ground. Lol indeed. We didn't even know that the area was a No Skating one until we got to the end, since it was all one continual concourse.
But then, of course, instead of just being like "oh we should leave because it says NO SKATING" we took photos of ourselves with the signs on the ground. But anyway, that bit wasn't too fun to skate--it was bumpy and kind of full of chairs on gravel--so we headed back around the concourse and up to the path towards the skate area and the car. The sun was setting when we were done. We actually skated for about two hours all up, but it didn't seem like much of a hard skate, although we were really hungry and then went home where Ze Boyfriend ordered pizza for dinner for us. We also went down to the local dessert cafe and got craploads of pie (and some very specific reheating instructions for optimal deliciousness on chocolate lava cake). Nom.
Incriminating evidence.
Also, at the Concourse, we stealth skated up to a squirrel, which seemed
to look straight at us but not realise what we were doing when we were
rolling towards it.
Last Tuesday I was too munted to skate, but I went afterwards for some hanging out and possible carpark goon and shennanigans. However, it was rainy so we relocated to McShits for one last team pie. Yay!
ALL OF THE FOOD. NOM.
I don't know if Team Pie will still be around after I leave, since at some point we all realised that Team Pie was pretty much us stuffing our faces and tripling our appropriate daily caloric intake. Also, we met a lot of really weird people at Maccas. Like, REALLY weird. There was a guy who claimed to be waiting for a bus and then ranted to us about immigration for an hour, and this other dude who friended Rubi on facebook and had all these guns in his profile picture or something and stalked one of her other friends. I think that's where the term "Roller Derpy" came from, to address those people.
Anyway, so we had one last Team Pie. Maybe if I do Team Pie in the US it won't be so bad, because there are all kinds of crazy ass awesome pies in the US, like cherry and strawberry rhubarb and lemon meringue and key lime and blackberry and whatever, so maybe when I move to Virginia I won't have to Team Pie at McDonalds and people will actually bring pies to training. That would be fucking awesome. But for now this will have to do:
This was the last pie in the pie warmer when we got there. Then they had to make like 20 more pies or we would have flipped some tables.
Plus the people who are on Team Pie are pretty fucking amazing. Yay.
What was useful about Bambi's coaching is that she explained
what the blockers were doing while the jammer was trying to get through, and
then what the blockers should do in respond and how the jammer should change
her strategy and stuff, so that was really cool. So technically we were
learning this stuff and aggressive jamming at the same time. But I thought it’d
be nifty to separate them to get a clearer understanding of what was happening.
(I think this entry will be shorter though, since we were supposed to be doing
aggressive jamming, and in order to do that there had to be some defensive
blocking, etc.)
Blocking and bracing your wall
Blockers 1 and 4 are on the outside, so they will be the ones to brace the wall made up of 2,3,4 (for blocker 1) and 1,2,3 (for blocker 4). There are two possible places to brace for each blocker. They can also push the jammer out over the line if necessary.
This was the main thing we worked on while the jammers were trying to get past. Basically, you can have your wall of four, and make a wall across the whole track. That's pretty handy, but if a jammer is going to be trying to get past, you will have at least one blocker who is not really doing anything because she's not at the part of the wall that the jammer is pushing at.
If this happens, the blocker furthest away (i.e. one of the line blockers) can swing in front and, facing the three blockers in the wall, use her arms to brace up the wall. Basically it's just to counter the force of the jammer pushing past. You're not supposed to be pushing the jammer back, but rather just holding the wall in place. Outside blockers to be sideways so they can also butt push jammer out of
play and over the line if they try to sneak past.
Here's a picture of CRDL applying the bracing thing:
It's technically 1-on-1 bracing, but it's keeping the opposing
jammer from getting past Shorty (as pivot).
As a bracer, there are a couple of important things to note:
Direction of gameplay: this was a big one. Just because you're facing backwards doesn't mean you can go backwards. You're supposed to be holding up the opposing jammer, not pushing them back. It's REALLY important to make sure you're still rolling in derby direction even if you're pushing on your teammate to counter the jammer.
Hand placement matters: When you're bracing, you're putting force on your teammate and using her as a wall. Watch where you are actually bracing your teammate. Hands on shoulders/pecs works much better than hands on their sternum. Or their throat.
Elbows: There'll be other shit going on around you while you are bracing. Keep your elbows in so you don't clock someone and get majored for it.
Talk to your pack: if you're skating backwards, you will be best able to see where the jammer is. Tell your blockers which side she's coming in on or if she is switching tactics so they will be able to prepare for getting hit (which also makes your job easier).
Helping out your jammer
Kinda like this. I imagine it's all pixelly too.
Okay, this is obvious, yes? But remember that derby is offensive and defensive at the same time, so while you're doing all this defensive blocking your jammer is still going to be hanging around trying to get past. Bambi said that, as a blocker, you have to do what you can to help your jammer. So, suppose that it's like in a video game and your jammer has an energy bar. Seriously. Every time your jammer has to take a step or a hit the bar goes down.
So as a blocker, you should be helping clear the path so she has to take less steps, or taking hits for her, or whatever. The best thing you can do is open up the inside line for your jammer, and you can do this by getting the blockers out of the way and off the line.
On Tuesday at training we had our first in a series of guest
trainers from Canberra Roller Derby League who were going to come and teach us
some new tricks. I almost didn’t go because of Ph.D. dramas, but I ended up
going and I am so fucking glad I did.
Firstly, Bambi was a great coach; I think she’d give Pain
from SCRD a run for her money. She was really good at explaining stuff and what
the strategy was for doing things and how to apply it and also just some general
stuff about learning in derby, which was useful since obviously she’d been
where we were. Shorty didn’t really say much but gave people a lot of
one-on-one pointers and did a lot of demo type stuff. She’s pretty damn funny
though.
Warmup was dynamic stretching and then some endurance type
stuff; we did 15 laps of the track anti-derby, then 30 squat jumps (on skates!)
and then 30 “dead bugs” which seemed to be really similar to bicycles but you
have the same arm and leg going instead of the opposite ones (see video). Then it was 10
laps derby direction, 20 squat jumps and dead bugs, then 5 laps and 10 squat
jumps and dead bugs. Wheeeeeeee.
Our first drill we did was explosive something something.
:P I can't remember the name. Basically, you paired up with someone and they put their toe stops down (or
plow stop, or whatever) and you had to push them. Running on your toe stops for
this was really useful, rather than just on your skates. I’d done some of this
at SCRD, and I really like running on my toe stops, so yeah I was excited for
this drill.
I was MUCH more excited when people paired off with others
of roughly their size and I was the odd one left and got paired up with Shorty.
Squee indeed. AND THEN I FOUND OUT SHE IS TALLER THAN ME. DAMMIT. Anyway, yeah
so I did a bunch of laps of the track pushing her around, and then she had a
go. My weak ankle (the right one) is mega dumb and doesn’t steer very well and
I kept going in circles, which was kind of embarrassing. :( It worked much better when I was basically in plow stop position but on my toe stops so my feet were more pigeon toed, than straight. But yeah, I made
her push pretty hard, and I have all the marks on my shoulders to prove it from
where she was digging her hands into my shoulder meat :P
Then the variation after that was to push someone with your
shoulder, so your pec was basically pushing theirs (and you had to keep your
head out of the way so you weren’t going to headbutt the other person). I found
this harder because when I run on toe stops I swing my arms a lot, and I
wouldn’t have been able to do that without punching Shorty in the crotch or
something. But yeah, that was a fun drill. :D
A scrum start. White would usually be taking a knee right on the
line and black would be standing but as close to them as
possible without touching. (Also because of my craptastic
paint skills it looks like the outside white blocker is leaving
an opening for the white jammer or something. Yep.)
Next, we worked on using the toe stop push to get through a pack. Bambi said that teams were more likely to do scrum starts now (i.e. have everyone at the jammer line), so once the jammer is released they immediately have to get through the pack, usually if one team knee started at the jammer line. Usually in these cases the blockers would make a wall, such that you'd have all four blockers in a line across the track, covering both inside and outside lines at the same time.
We worked on several techniques for breaking walls. Walls can be made of seriously ANY number of blockers, so we practiced a bunch of different things. Basically, the key thing in all wall-breaking cases was to pick some spot--either between two blockers, or pushing one blocker out of the way to create a gap--and then go for it. We started with a wall of three (with a fourth one bracing) and trying to get a jammer to bust through. I found the running-on-toe-stops thing quite useful for pushing through blockers.
Then we did wall-busting in between two blockers. Importantly, in a game situation your blockers won't be completely stuck shoulder-to-hip together, but might be slightly spaced apart, so there is naturally a gap to get through. We tried a bunch of different things in a "jammer against two blockers" scenario:
Shoulder charge: basically you use your shoulder like a battering ram and aim for the the back of the blockers' arms, or straight through the gap that is between them.
Kidney punch: I like this one a lot! You keep your head down and use your shoulders to basically hit the blockers in their kidneys. Seriously. Be careful not to headbutt them or (as I did) get my head stuck in the gap between the blockers.
Shark attack: you start low and "pop up" between the blockers. I think you can use the back of your shoulders to push them out of the way.
Stepping through: If there's a big enough gap between where the blockers have their feet, get down and step through it to get past them. This is hard to do quickly, but it's essential that you actually do it quickly, or else you get stuck.
Here's Shorty doing the shark thingy at TGSS (although it might have started as a kidney punch):
Photo: Steve Craddock
You can also combine them: for example, you can start low and step
through between blockers and then pop up in a shark attack. Or you can do the shoulder charge and when the gap comes up you step through. What's
important is that you have the element of surprise. For the record, Rubi
and I were the "demo people" for Shorty demonstrating surprise, which
was hilarious because obviously we knew she was going to bust between
us, but then when she actually did I think her charging into me actually
propelled me like 3 metres or something, and I was screaming the whole
time.
Finally, we did some juking. For this drill, we paired off and you had to get past your partner who was booty blocking you. There were a couple of things to pay attention to. Juking is a combination of speed and agility--I think Bambi said that Bonnie D. Stroir said that there's some sweet spot where your speed and agility meet, such that you're maximally agile while not plowing into the back of people (and getting called for back blocking). Basically, the idea is that you only juke as fast as you can skate while being agile.
Attempted juking diagram. Basically, the
jammer skates straight up to the PoNR and
then does the 3-step thingy to get around the
blocker (clearly not to scale.)
Bambi described something called the "point of no return" or something--basically you should only juke when the blocker can't see your feet. If they can see your feet, they are likely to know what you are going to do. So you should skate up to them as close as you can before busting out your juke moves. (This is also where the speed/agility thing is important; if you skate too close to them and can't stop, you back block them.) We practiced doing a three-step juke, basically you go left-right-left or right-left-right and then around the blocker. It also helped if you confused your blocker by making them look over both shoulders. Crossing seemed to be quite useful here, although not necessary (if you can also clumsily stomp to either side for the juke).
Another way you could juke is by basically fast feeting (feeting?? WTF) behind the blocker, and then getting past them because they don't know what your footwork is doing. Also, one thing to do is to get your foot in front of theirs and block them with your hip/shoulder. If your foot is in front of your opposing blocker's, when the block you they'll actually be pushing you forward. (I found this kind of hard to do without wheel clipping, but maybe I just need to work on that more.)
And then there was a bit of a strategy chat while we warmed down, and then we were done! It was seriously an awesome session; I probably learned more in those two hours than I have for a very long time. Also, I was a bit of a nerd and got RefDonald to take a picture of me with Shorty at the end. Yeah.
When we were taking this Shorty was like,
"Yeah you have to go Asian style". Heh.
(Also, photobomb by Bambi.)
(No, not as in the name of the stupid club on Glee.)
WTF. No.
On Tuesday we had our Annual General Meeting. I've always been adamant that the administrative side of running a league is something that is necessary, but not a necessary evil as it might otherwise be seen. But yeah, my administration is over, and now the reins have been handed off to a new and dynamic new executive committee (on which my wife is Vice President, fuck yeah).
I'm excited for VDL's second year. We certainly faced a lot of challenges as a league this year, what with stupid dramas and not having our own venue and not actually knowing what we were doing and having only a handful of bouting skaters and being in the same city as an existing league and having to carve out our own identity, but I think we did pretty well for ourselves. We made a bouting team, increased our membership to over 100 people and got our name out there. And there are already some pretty big plans in the works for the coming year, which is exciting.
It's been good seeing this league grow from the ground up. Because I'm
finishing a Ph.D. and moving overseas in three weeks, my time left with
VDL is short, but I feel better knowing it's in safe hands for next
year. I feel like a mother who's just seen her child take its first
steps or something or go on a bike or something by herself or something.
Okay, first off, I have NO idea why it's called that. Seriously.
Now that that's out of the way, this is one of the funner drills we've done lately. It's pretty easy to understand: basically, you have two groups on the track of equal number. One group are blockers, and the other group are jammers. Yes, so you can have like 4-5+ jammers on the track at the same time. The aim for the jamming group is to get all their members out through the pack, and obviously the blocking group is to prevent that from happening. If you did a major, you had to reenter from the back of the pack and try getting through it again. Then after all the jammers were through, you swapped.
We had about 5 people in each group. We tried two variations of this drill: first, if you were jamming and made it out of the pack, that was all well and good and you were done, or you could go back into the pack and help other jammers through (but you didn't have to get through the pack again). The other version required ALL the jammers to get through the pack together, such that if you ate the baby (i.e. got reabsorbed by the pack) you had to try to get out again, and the drill wasn't over until all the jammers were clearly out together. That one was crazy hard because the blockers just kept speeding up to make sure the jammers couldn't pass and we ended up with the crazy 70-foot rule thing happening. I'd never seen it before but when everyone was so spread out it was seriously like WTF. But I think the non-eating-the-baby-version worked much better, in terms of organisation and pack structure.
We did this as a scrimmaging drill, but obviously if you're not cleared for hitting you can do this drill with positional blocking or something.Keeping the pack together was tricky. But this is a fast-paced drill,
and lets you focus on offensive or defensive blocking. Helping out team
members was also really important. But yeah! Mega fun drill, and one I'd like to do again.
In our league we have people who have been skating on their derby names for a year or so, and have recently found out their names have been rejected from the TwoEvils site. But they've bouted under those names, had uniforms and helmets done up with those names, and are just finding out that that was all worth shit.
I talked about TwoEvils here in this entry, but I think there’s increasing frustration with how the site is run. While I certainly appreciate that someone out there has gone to the effort
of keeping a site like 2E, derby has grown exponentially, and the system that
2E uses is clunky and can’t really keep up with the volume of names that one
can only imagine they get registered. At the time of writing this, there are something like 36,144 names on 2E. That's THIRTY SIX THOUSAND names that you can't copy.
Honestly, I think the time will come very
soon when one of the following will happen:
Nobody cares about 2E anymore and will actually seek to register
their name formally as intellectual property or on regional associations
(like RDAU) instead,
Nobody will care about having unique names in the derby world (come
on, there’s really only SO many combinations of words you can do that aren’t
above some degree of similarity) or
2E will have to evolve its registration
system to make it easier for people to actually get onto their site.
Waiting
for 9-10 months is kind of ridiculous. Half the names of the people we
registered with VDL are obsolete or don’t even skate with VDL anymore, so that was a waste of time for the 2E people to have to process them. I
can’t imagine that a considerable proportion of names on the 2E list are
actually currently being used.
Vague concepts = opportunity to trundle in
Sorites paradox! (Yes, I'm a nerd.)
Also, at the time, if your name is rejected you have no idea if it is or
isn’t, except for the fact that your teammates all have their names up and you
don’t. TBut today, we received an email from 2E listing the names that were rejected, but with no explanation why they were. I can imagine how frustrating this would be to some people, especially if their names were only remotely smiilar to other names there.
The best indicator of a name rejection is when you type a name in and it
tells you the likelihood of a match (from very high to low). But terms like
“very high” and “low” are vague, and it’s not clear exactly what that means for
rejection. Since the system is automated, changing a letter sometimes does the
trick, even if phonetically the names would still be the same. What’s the point
of that?
Presumably 2E works something like this (although, of course, I am open to correction): There’s this online
spreadsheet (in effect) with everyone’s names on it, and when you submit names
they are checked off against the spreadsheet for similarity. Those that don’t
match anything are admitted, and those that match things are rejected, and then
there’s some additional checking that goes on for the in-between ones. I don’t
know if the additional checking is manual, but I’d assume that it is, given how
long it takes.
Ironically, THERE IS NOBODY CALLED JOHN DOE ON 2E.
Many people are already moving away from 2E. In Australia, RDAU has its own list for roller derby names for Australian leagues. It's not like I'm ever going to have to bout against someone called MadMouse from some random place like Bumblefuck USA or anything, so why the hell would I need something that is internationally original? (Of course, yes, my name IS on 2E, but the principle still stands.)
Obviously, we need to make sure that people aren't waiting 9-12 months for their names to clear. How do we fix that? Well, how about this: there’s already an automated
checking thingy that exists on the 2E website. Why not use that to let people
add names to the list themselves? Like, suppose I have a list of names. Maybe I
can just copy/paste them into the name submitter thing, and it runs through the
names and automatically adds the ones
that are unique to the site. The in-between ones can be confirmed by looking at
what the search throws up as being the most similar, and then maybe there can
be a section for people to provide evidence if they’ve got permission from a
skater to use their name. That would considerably reduce the workload that the 2E
admins have to do, since there’s less manual labor involved, and let people get
instant gratification almost right away.
This is who I'd want to be checking my name
on the website. Of course, that just means less
manual checking, not no manual checking
whatsoever.
Now I’m not a mega computer nerd, but I’m sure there’s a
pretty basic program you could write that would let that happen. But that said,
I’m not sure how much longer unique names will be sustainable in the derby
world. Of course, there are already trends for people to skate under their
actual names (which you’d think would be necessary if roller derby becomes an Olympic sport or something) and hey, if someone just happens to have the same (actual)
name as you, then what are you going to do?
But so far as having a program for
registering names on 2E goes, I’m not sure why this hasn’t happened yet. So consider this a plea to the 2E peeps: Nice work so far, but you don't need to have this burden all by yourself. Please consider updating your system to be able to deal with the number of submissions you're getting for this sport that we have all come to love. We want our names, because the derby side of us is, well, a real part of us, and it is really shit when you are denying that we can have that.
(Postscript: my MS Word spellcheck is dumb and doesn’t
recognise the word “Pow”, or the word “spellcheck” for that matter.)
*Speaking of mascots and skates, I imagine that this post will have possibly enraged some. Here, lighten it up with some mascot skating fail. (This is also why I don't support the Raptors, heh.)
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.
...the old guard in the league are now registered with TwoEvils!!
2E is a website that lists ALL the names of people who do derby (banked or flat) around the world. It's like a database that you check before you pick your derby name, so nobody has the same name without clearance from the other person. It's actually a really interesting system for social conventions forcing people to be original with names, and it's actually been the subject of a couple of academic articles (of the "Freakonomics" slant) about how the community regulates name ownership and stuff. As an ex-lawyer and academic, I'm excited that there are even academic articles about derby, especially in intellectual property law.
We put our names in in September last year and they came up last night. 2E is run by a handful of skaters and there are a LOT of leagues in the world, so they have craploads to do and naturally there's a backlog. Of course, not everyone's name is there--sometimes someone's name gets accepted before yours (but after yours has been submitted), and you have no idea that your name has been rejected for similarity grounds until after the fact. I'm sure there could be automated systems that would bypass the manual inputting that goes on. In fact, I'm surprised that there isn't yet, but there you go!
Also, nobody in the world has my derby number yet, heh. (Of course numbers don't need to be original, but yeah, nobody up there has an emoticon mouse...)
This was a nice surprise to wake up (pretty sore) to. And there's training tonight again. Yeah.
