Now for some art

So one of the ladies I used to skate with back at VDL (Cruel-Roller De'Ville) is also is in the States now, going to cartoon school in Vermont. Roller made a comic about the state of Men's Derby in Vermont. It looks like this:

The merby issue is an interesting one. There are no sports I can think of which are predominantly female oriented that don't also have an element of the athlete doing things that look good-- the "looking good" ones I had in mind were gymnastics, figure skating and cheerleading (hell, there are few sports I can think of which are predominantly female oriented at all). I am totally on the fence about whether or not merby poses a threat to derby as we know it. Recently, the best mens' derby league at the moment (Your Mom) beat Gotham at a private scrimmage, and there was a lot of talk of the men coming in to take our sport away or whatever. I don't think that's the case, but I can see the worry if you're not willing to share the sport or whatever.

On the other side of the fence, I also know some men who think "Merby" is a derogatory term. I'm not sure exactly why but maybe it goes along the line of "moobs" and "murse" as well. To be fair, I don't see it as derogatory but it's not great; you could just call it "derby" for everyone without needing to make that distinction. It's like, why do you need to say "female doctor" or "female parliamentarian" or something when they are just doctors and parliamentarians?

Roller's full comic is here.

Return to SCRD

I skated with SCRD as a visiting skater last year, and they are an amazing bunch of ladies. I wrote a lot about them in earlier entries here.

Right now, I'm back on the West Coast visiting Ze Boyfriend. Last week, I went back there since (relatively speaking) I'm in the area. I like what they've done with the place. They took out the middle wall so now there's more room for the track, as well as a few little ramps on the side. Also, as a side note, they DID end up doing the OCD floor tile thing with the sport court that I got shit for last time. HA!

Junior derby in action. They are so tiny!

 They also have a whole new batch of recruits, which is great. I met this super cute couple whose derby names are (get this) Ashes to Ashes and Dust to Dust. Now that's like a whole new metalevel of derby naming when you coordinate your name with someone else. I also was reunited with a lot of the old guard, which was also lovely. There were a lot of hugs. Yay.

Anyway, we started with some crossover technique practice. Now there's some sense in which I can do crossovers, but there's another sense in which I don't, because I don't push with my inside leg. Psycho calls it a "squirrelly thing I do with my legs" when I cross. So we did a bit of just grapevining across the room, focusing first on getting a big step over with your front leg, and then on the "flick" thing you do with your back foot, and then getting as low as possible while doing it, and the putting it all together.

We did some other drills, which I'll write up separately. And there was scrimmage! The teams are basically the A and B teams split evenly (so they sort all the A team players first, and then the B teams). I normally just get put with the B team, and that's fine by me. And D said that EVERYONE had to jam, so that was good. I managed to avoid a few hard hits but when I got knocked off the track, I tried tomahawking on their floor at speed to turn back and I fell on my ass because the floor was so much slicker than what I'm used to. It was like I put my toe stops down and my feet just went from under me.

But one thing I really like about SCRD (which I've not seen done at other leagues) is that everyone warms up together, and then everyone sits in a circle to stretch at the beginning of the session. This is a good time for introductions or to go through announcements (from committee chais) and whatever. I really like how they do that. Plus they also spend a few minutes doing that at the end of each session, as a cooldown and also to remind people of upcoming events (e.g. they have a bout coming up, so everyone please sell your bout tickets, or be here on a particular day to pack up the floor to take to the venue, or whatever).

So we did that, and then D made everyone go around and introduce themselves again (since some people came late to the session) and then also promise something they were going to do, and people said things like they would wash their pads or drink more water or whatever. I didn't know what to say so then I said while I was visiting, I would bring cake at some point. Ha.

So that was last week.

And then yesterday, CAKE! Yes, I am a lady of my word.

Lemon raspberry mini cupcakes. NOM!

Actually Tila also brought cupcakes because (unbeknownst to me) it was Karen's birthday. But that meant there was multiple cake, so hooray!

Science is awesome!

(Or is this in the realm of math? Or engineering? I don't know.)

So, I read today that a guy in California has invented a wheel. No, keep reading. That's not the end of it. It's a wheel that rolls faster and better than a round wheel, across a variety of terrains.

AND IT IS SHAPED LIKE A CUBE.

 

YES. A CUBE. LOOK AT IT.

Okay, it's not SO crazy. The cube shape has a wave pattern, so you would still get a roll on these wheels. The grooves in them mean you don't roll over debris, but they get "funnelled" off to the outside, so you're less likely to trip and eat shit if you skate outdoors. Plus because there are those big grooves, there's less contact area with the ground so you have less friction, which would result in a smoother roll on a variety of surfaces.

So far it's only available for skateboards, but if this takes off, I wouldn't mind trying these for derby, especially given the way these are made. The super cool thing about this is that they're made by snapping together smaller wheel-parts of different hardnesses. So if you wanted a sticker inside on your inside wheel (e.g. if you push more on one side of your wheel than the other--and you can see how much you do this by checking your wheels for coning), the bam! You just put together different segments of different hardnesses and Bob's your uncle.

(That said, there's already something like this on the market in the form of Faster skates' demilune wheels, which were released several months ago, but haven't seen to have taken off. But they have a little strip of sticker urethane closer to the axle on each wheel for more push.)

More information is available on the kickstarter here.

NRV also has a new website!

And NRV also has an updated website! Yay! Hahaha we did headshots the other day for it, but I didn't expect them to be up so soon. I remember we got to do "smiley" ones and "scary" ones where you looked serious and intimidating. I was really bad at those and the photographer had to keep telling me that my stink eye was bad and that if I stood up straighter I would look scarier and so on. :P

But yay, new website! Also, boo shiny face :/

NRV gets a new logo!

NRV had been doing a contest for a new logo for the past few months. Rebranding can be hard, but I don't think anyone was super tied to the original logo we had. This is what it looked like:

It didn't really do much in terms of saying anything at all about roller derby, and the font was weird and hard to read, and reminds me of tribal tattoos from the late 90's, which are probably on a lot of wrinkly and saggy lower backs and upper arms right now.

So we put the call out we got a bunch of possible candidates. The entries that we got were a range of different ones in different shapes, ideas, and symbols of the New River area. A few weeks ago the league looked at the finalists and put it to a vote.

This is the shiny new one, unveiled last night:

Yay! The pictures are black and white here, but there is also a black/pink/white versioon if we were printing in three colors. I like it. It's at least clearer that it is actually more skatey, and I guess there are mountains in the area (well, it's New River VALLEY, so of course there'd have to be some hilly topography to make it such the case that valleys exist). 

Also, it helps resolve the problem I had with never knowing if it was "Roller Girls" as two words, or "Rollergirls" as one. (I thought it was one word; apparently it is two.) :P

Hitting/timing drill with pace line

We've been working more on timing our hits, and I like this one a lot because it sounds easy but it's actually pretty hard to do well.

So you start with a pace line, going at a moderate pace in the middle of the track:

Yes, my paint skills are so good.

The last two people peel off the pace line and skate to the front. One goes on the inside of the pace line, one goes on the outside. The skater the inside is the "blocker" and the skater on the outside is the "jammer".

When they reach the front of the pace line, the blocker is to hit the jammer out.

This is much harder than it sounds; the jammer is flooring it (usually) and even though they're on the inside, the blocker has to actually skate pretty quick to catch up, but not too quickly that they overshoot the front of the pace line and leave a big hole behind them for the jammer to go through, or getting too much speed so the blocker goes out with the jammer.

Then when they're done, they form the front of the pace line and the next two go.

Variation: once you've done the basic version, you can also do a more advanced version where the blocker can hit the jammer out in between other skaters in the pace line. Timing is crucial here, since otherwise the blocker will hit other skaters, or fuck up the pace line.

 

(And that's embarassing because it screws up the drill so you don't want to do that.)

I have taught them well.

I have a lot of derby posters on my door so it's
not hard to guess that I'm into derby if you're
a student who shows up for office hours.

Right now I'm not doing a lot of big posts because I'm busy with the end of the semester in my non-derby life, which involves (among other things) a lot of grading.

I usually don't tell students upfront that I do derby because 1) I did this last semester and then one of them tweeted it to the internet from class and 2) being in a college town, it's already hard enough to have a life away from academia and students, so I try to keep those things separate.

But of course, the derby monster is a big monster, and occasionally he creeps into my academic work. I advertise our bouts on my office door. I also wear my derby helmet when I ride my bike to work. I also had a diagram of a track on my whiteboard in my office once because I was explaining what derby was to some students who came by to ask. Yep.

Anyway, this semester, I taught a graduate seminar where one of the main topics we talked about collective responsibility and whether group was anything over and above the individuals that constitution it and that sort of stuff. It was a good class; the grad kids all know I do derby, since they have offices down the hall from my office anyway and can see when new flyers go up.

So I found this today in a paper I was grading:

Consider, for analogy, a roller derby team.  When they lose or win, they do so as a team, and this means more than each of the members winning individually (the coherence of which is doubtful).  Although the individual performances strongly affect the outcome, there are properties that the team has as a group that affects the responsibility for their performance.  For instance, if a team lacks a particular position, say a really scrappy jammer, they would be far worse off than a team composed of individually equally-skilled players that includes a jammer.  Yet, there is no straightforward way in which the responsibility for not being a jammer is "shared" by the members of the team. 

To be clear, I hvae no idea what a "scrappy jammer" is, but considering this student didn't know anything about derby at the beginning of the semester, I'd say he's done pretty well. :D