Okay, so the NRV all-stars are having their opening bout tomorrow for the season. I'm on the bout production committee, and my job (at least for this bout) is to make some snack baskets for the teams and the refs. We have baskets; all I have to do is fill them for about $30.
Also now all the food has been on the ground next to my
stinky gear. At least everything is prepackaged. I call this
a food handling win.
I feel a little bit like a waterboy doing this. Also, I have an idea of how much a derby girl or boy eats (a LOT), and feeding that many people for virtually under $1 a person is pretty tough. Plus, you want the things to be nutritious to some extent, and/or be good sources of energy. And THEN presumably they've got to be relatively easy to eat; something prepackageed and edible with hands (with stinky wrist guards on, ew) would be the goal.
So off I went to the store. Shopping on a budget is hard; shopping on a budget with nutritional restrictions is even harder. I had to get lots of things that were on sale or were cheaper if you had a membership card from the grocery store. I actually ended up spending something like $38 but got a fair bit, and there are leftovers for next time as well. So this is waht the baskets look like:
The baskets don't look super terrible when they're filled.
This is what they have in them:
Bananas (obviously)
Chocolate chip cookies
Peanut butter cookies
Peanut butter cracker things
Cheese cracker sandwich things
Berry trail mix
Random assorted mini candy bars
Gummi bears
Potato chips (you could get an assorted box of snack size ones for $10)
I assume I don't have to get each person one of everything; presumably these are supposed to supplement food that they already have with them. But yeah, I managed to cram them all into the baskets, and then also have some left to make a snack/thankyou box for the announcer (who is driving from Charlotte) and also possibly feed the NSOs.
Oh, and I also got a free box of cake mix from the store with some random store coupon, so tomorrow I'll make cupcakes for the NSOs; it's like they are always neglected in these cases and they work pretty damn hard. And that way I'm feeding pretty much everyone who has anything to do with the bout for under $40 because I am a champ. :D
FREE CAKE. YOU CAN KEEP YOUR NASTY HEALTHY FOOD.
I just hope it's enough food for everyone... it's not like I'm Jesus or anything and can do magic food division.
SASHIMI AND BREADCRUMBS FOR EVERYONE!
Random reminder that I am in the South: when I went to load up my cart with bananas, the guy who was stocking them was looking and said "are you making banana puddin' or something?" and I said no and explained why I needed like 20 bananas, and then I was like "damn I really want banana pudding now, because that shit is tasty." I love southern food.
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!
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...
I like this drill a lot. It's really easy and you can change it depending on the skill level of the people doing it. I don't know why it's called Frogger, but I guess there's a sense in which it's like the video game in that you have to move around obstacles (other skaters) and stuff?
This was the version I played as a kid. Oh, memories.
You start by making a pack with all the skaters in it and have the skating as a pack. This is really important for the drill. Then, the person running the drill (presuambly not in the pack) will call out specific commands either for the entire pack, or for individual people.
Commands you could call for the entire pack are:
speed up
slow down
stop
touch two people (to make sure that you were still close enough in the pack)
(in theory I guess you could say stop and turn around but we didn't)
Then there were specific commands, so you'd call out someone's name and then say something like:
go to the front
go to the back
go to the inside
go to the outside
hit [some other person]
and the last one was fun because if you were hitting or being hit, you might be on opposite ends of the pack and you'd have to find the other person while the pack was still moving.
We did this one for about 10 minutes, then had a break and then did it again. I really liked it, you have to look in all directions and people started calling out where there were holes that needed filling and moving people into the right spots and it worked really well and was pretty fun to boot.
I've been a little bit bleh with my fitness at practice, so Leap Year and I are going to try to do Ab Fab February. It's basically a workout you do every day (Sunday being breaks) where you start with something pretty easy (yesterday's was 15 sit ups, 5 pushups and a 15 second plank) and then increase that workload throughout the month.
The exercise chart looks like this:
I've done 1 and 2 already, so it's rest day, yay.
I think if I really tried I could do the 25 pushups and 100 situps etc. now, but I'd be angry and tired and this way it'll make me do more exercise overall. Plus if I did them now there would be no motivation for me to improve. I'm quite bad at exercising by myself (e.g. I'll start a run and then be like "fuck this, this is tiring" and go home), so having someone else doing this as well who can be my exercise buddy will hopefully help!
P.S. Hahaha Leap Year is called Leap Year because (obviously) she was born on Feb 29. So for her this-year birthday, her present to herself is 100 sit ups.
Wednesday was my first practice back. It was okay; I felt a bit rusty and when we were practicing scrim situations I got goated a bit. Boo. But it was really nice to be back on skates after a month off and getting fat and lazy.
We did a drill that I really liked; it had enough different elements to make it fun and interesting, and it was quick and made me sweaty and tired, so that was also good. I can't remember what Smack called the drill, but since the basic premise involves a double pace line I'm going to call it Two by Two.
That said, when I think of "Two by Two" I think of one of the following:
Noah's Ark:
This is the cutest and most non-religious picture of Noah's ark I could find/
That song from the Book of Mormon:
Hands of blue
Those gloves always remind me of the security dudes
at US airports when you get patted down and stuff.
Yes, I am a geek. :P
Anyway, the drill is as follows. You set up a double pace line and just do laps of the track in pace line formation so each person has someone next to them. Then, when certain commands are yelled, you do things to/with your partner.
For example, if SWITCH is yelled, you basically switch places with your partner. But you're in a pace line, so there's an order you do this in. So the person on the inside moves forward, and then waterfalls to the outside while the outside partner steps to the inside:
1 is the starting move for Switch; yellow steps forward, blue moves into her spot.
Yellow then steps right and slows down so blue and yellow are both next to each other (as in (2)).
Then sometimes there'll be offensive/defensive things, like the following:
INSIDE LEAN (inside person leans on the outside skater until they are over the outside line)
OUTSIDE LEAN (outside person leans on the inside skater until they are over the inside line)
INSIDE HIP/SHOULDER CHECK (inside person checks the outside skater)
OUTSIDE HIP/SHOULDER CHECK (outside person leans on the inside skater)
In all these cases, remember that you're still in a pace line and moving relatively quickly, so if you get leaned out/checked you have to still hoof it back to keep your place in the pace line. And switching will also change whether you are the inside/outside person, so you have to really listen out and pay attention to that stuff.
Another thing that might get yelled out is PUSH/PULL. Basically the outside person pushes the inside person closer to the inside line, and then pulls them back into position (usually by their shirt or arm or something).
That could get confusing.
One final command that got called out was the pretty obvious WEAVE. You're in a pace line anyway, so that wasn't too bad. You bascially did the push/pull with your partner as you went through, so the inside partner would always be leading the pair when they were heading inside, and the outside partner would be leading the pair when they were heading to the outside.
Then, a variation on this was WEAVE WITH CHECKS. You still did the same weave with the push/pull as before, but the leading partner got to check the first person of the pair of people in the pace line that they passed:
Our pace line was pretty quick, and after a while it got a bit messy. Maybe a variation would be to have instructions controlling speed, like SPEED UP or SLOW DOWN or whatever. But overall it was a good drill, and we had a pretty cracking pace and all the footwork and checking and catching up meant that it was a good workout overall.
So last week I found out I passed WFTDA minimum skills test. I was actually kind of surprised since I did the test when I was pretty sick and uncoordinated. But hooray. Importantly, this means I can be drafted onto a team and actually get to bout somewhat regularly with NRV. Bouting time here I come!
