Roller derby explained in a simple YouTube video

Sometimes, when I tell people about derby, one of the most difficult things to explain about the rules is that it's a points scoring game, where BOTH teams play offense and defense at the same time. For some reason, this is confusing to people.

In the past, there's been a standard roller derby explanation video that I've seen at bouts:

 However, it's literally the basic rules, and doesn't really get into a lot of the strategy, or why people do what they do in a pack. There are other pretty simple rules that explain that.

Here's a video that Rose City put together which sums THAT up pretty well, as well as with the basics:

I guess the only tricky part is if you're not familiar with American currency?


Plus, it also says Roller Derby > pretty much every North American sport, so yeah. Enjoy, and learn!

Limited time! Gotham City Rollergirls shirts!

No, not those skaters from Gotham. This is a mashup of female DC comic characters and roller derby. They're available on Teefury now.

Apart from Harley, they're all missing helmets (unless Batgirl's helmet counts as a derby helmet... I'm not sure what the WFTDA rules are about the face mask bit but I'll let it slide). The art's all done by TomKurzanski.

However, as with all Teefury deals, they only last for one day. As of writing this, you've got just over 21 hours to pick up yours!

WFTDA changes rules about what counts as a derby number

It's time to retire those jerseys that say "B00BS".

Today, WFTDA announced that, by the end of next year, jersey numbers will not be able to include alphabetic characters.

Specifically, they state that the rule change will not go into effect until December 2015, so that teams
will have time to adjust to this. I suspect that what they mean by this is that teams have time to get new jerseys for their skaters, or that you can start saving up for your new jersey now.

The Olympics is international, and
Usain Bolt gets letters on his jersey; why can't we?

It's not clear what the motivation for this is, except that there is some speculation that WFTDA's international reputation means that it shouldn't be relying on the Roman alphabet, as some places don't use that. However, that argument only goes so far, as surely the same can be said for different numbering systems as well. Conversely, it might be argued that international scientific systems, or sporting systems, like the Olympics, have to agree on using a particular alphanumeric system as well, so why can't WFTDA?

It seems that this will go over well with refs and officials more so than skaters, where reading numbers is way easier than letters.

Roller Jammer is a video game that predates modern derby

So there's recently been a group of people who have ported all these old-school video games (like Frogger, Pac Man, etc.) to make them playable in your browser. The whole collection is available to play for free at The Internet Arcade.

Amongst the offerings, I found a game called Roller Jammer.

So of course I played it, and while it's obviously not a game about WFTDA derby, you play a skater who has to pass a bunch of other opposing skaters and you get points for each one you pass. You can also jump and punch them.

WUT?

Some scrounging online shows that it was made in 1984, which makes it older than the current reincarnation of roller derby, which started in the early 2000s. My mind is blown.



Here's a video of some of the game footage. Or you can play it yourself here.

The differences between derby real life behavior

Sometimes there are behaviors in roller derby that aren't, well, acceptable in non-derby contexts. For example, Mr. Mouse HATES when I come back from practice and tell him to smell my wrists because hey non-derby people don't appreciate derby stank.

So Vette City Roller Derby has put out this helpful video to let you know what you shouldn't be doing around civilians.

That said, I think that juking is totally acceptable when other people are slow walkers!

An interview with Shortstop!

(Which I didn't conduct)

So yeah, in Australia, derby is a big deal but surprisingly not majorly newsworthy, unless you count that debacle in 2013 about Women in Sport.

But here is an interview with Shorty done by the Saturday Paper. An interview! Usually it's reporters just speculating about stuff they see on the sidelines, so interviews are uncommon. I would have liked to have seen more about her role on Team Australia, but there you go. Woooo!

A mouthguard that can tell when you're having a concussion

Science and technology are awesome. Okay, sure they make things like nukes and whatnot but sometimes there are things that come along which are really useful and we wonder why nobody thought of them before. You know, things like this mouthguard:

For anyone who's had a concussion before, you know those things aren't fun. Your vision is blurry, you can't make proper sentences and falling down is a constant thing. Ok, and of course there's also the fact you've got some kind of brain damage.

Mouthguards in derby are supposed to help prevent that to some extent--when you fall on your head the force of impact can be distributed and absorbed by your jaw and your mouthguard is there to reduce the injury to your body. But the problem is that there's little research on concussions in derby specifically--I mean, we've adopted our safety gear from other sports, and we're still in the early days of knowing how to protect ourselves in a way specific to our sport.

So, the next best thing from actually being able to protect yourself specifically for your sport is to be able to protect yourself generally, AND also get information about how these injuries are occurring. I'm a big fan of information gathering. Enter the FITGuard mouthguard, which has an indicator to tell you the likelihood of your having a concussion in a pretty foolproof way.

Here's an article on HuffPost about it. In particular, they say:

The FITGuard has a green LED strip on the front that turns blue when it detects a medium force impact and red when there’s an above-50 percent chance the athlete has suffered a concussion. The athlete can then use an app to download a data log showing why the guard is displaying a given color. The data will also be uploaded to a central database to help the FIT team improve the device.

Yeah, so that's a handy-dandy way to helping determine the injury. Plus one thing that's good is that you can tell without having to take the skater's helmet off (which might make things worse if they have some other injury, e.g. to their neck).


Plus it's a LED strip so you'd glow in the dark (maybe)!




It kind of reminds me of those stickers they put on things in Mythbusters to measure G Forces or whatever (for illustration, here's the Exploding Water Heater episode, the stickers are at 0:35 onwards but stick around for the explosions):

Yeah, I'm glad my head doesn't do that when I get a concussion.