Sean and the Roller Derby: rec league induction and double-header
Saturday was a looonngg day. I got up really early, as some of us were meeting at a coffee shop before the session started. I managed to get there an hour before we were due to meet - I was in West Brompton by 9am - so I pootled about a bit, bought a paper, and went to the coffee shop at 9:30 and had a bacon baguette and some tea(!). People turned up around 10 and we were all nervous together. At 10:30 we made our way to West Brompton Hall where people were setting up tracks for the bout and for the training.
There were probably two or three times as many girls there for the intake than I was expecting. Derby has got really popular in the past year or so! Even Neil Gaiman goes to watch it these days.
The next three hours was spent on a whizz-bang tour of the basic skating techniques one uses in derby, including two sorts of stops, four sorts of falls, skating without lifting your wheels off the floor, derby stance, pace lines, crossovers, and stretching exercises. And a sort of push-up used when you were late back when the whistle was blown :-)
I was glad I'd done the skating I had, so I didn't *completely* embarrass myself. Some of the things I could do, sort of, some of them not but I got the idea. And you learn that your pads really do protect you, when you're throwing yourself at a concrete floor!
But I've got a long way to go. And not being an exercise sort of person, I'm going to have to work out how to get fitter at the same time as learning to skate and also keep up with the hungry derby newbies. The next thing for the group of people I've been meeting to skate, is to find somewhere indoors we can practice the techniques we learn between sessions - baseball slides probably not too popular at roller discos!
So that was pretty knackering. But still interesting and fun, plus the trainers were really good at the techniques they were demonstrating, and helpful and nice to me. Extra points to Katy Peril and Vigour Mortis for their help and suggestions.
After I got changed, and checked in with the head NSO (who's in charge of the non-skating officials for the bouts in the afternoon), I went to meet my skater friends in the pub for an hour, where we compared bruises and debriefed/decompressed.
Then it was back to the venue to prepare for the bouts. London Rollergirls have four teams - the Ultraviolent Femmes were playing the Harbour Grudges first, followed by a game between the Steam Rollers and the Suffra Jets. At 4 o'clock the doors opened, and the first bout started at 5.
The next few hours passed in a bit of a whirl. Both games were pretty evenly matched, and all teams were missing some key players due to injury, so it was quite exciting. I was timing penalties, which meant keeping an eye out for penalty calls and girls skating to the penalty box so you are prepared to time them sitting out. Which doesn't always mean you get to follow the actual game, because you're trying to handle your segment of it the best you can. On the other hand, you get the best seats in the house, between the two team benches and right between the jammer and pivot lines :-)
We had three people doing penalty timing - a manager who handled the jammers and handled the odd extra thing, and one person to do the two blocker seats for each team. If when a blocker skates in and all their team's seats are full, they have to go back out again and come in later to do their penalty.
The actual timing isn't really arduous - at 50 seconds you tell them to stand ("red 14 stand") and at a minute you tell them they're done ("red 14 done") and you stop the stopwatches between jams - but you could have one blocker standing, one blocker sitting and one just arriving to sit in the seat of the standing player, so it can get busy and you have to be alert. And if they leave before you've said "done", as one of the Steam Rollers did, they have to come back in for another minute plus the time they missed from the previous time. You have to get the referees' attention and get them to tell the player to come back in again. Also sometimes a referee will have given them two minutes, so you also have to be aware that the referee might be trying to communicate that to you while you're seating the player.
If you're on Facebook, there's a picture of me doing it here: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=500946758324
In the end the Harbour Grudges won 116-100, and the Steam Rollers won 112-105 - both really close games when you consider you could easily get 10-15 points in the last jam if the opposition jammer was in the penalty box.
And so to the afterparty, where I caught up with the Croydon girls and a few others I hadn't seen, and thanked my two trainers for helping me out earlier, and left about midnight, tired but happy as they say. Now to the hard part - training and learning the roller derby...
There were probably two or three times as many girls there for the intake than I was expecting. Derby has got really popular in the past year or so! Even Neil Gaiman goes to watch it these days.
The next three hours was spent on a whizz-bang tour of the basic skating techniques one uses in derby, including two sorts of stops, four sorts of falls, skating without lifting your wheels off the floor, derby stance, pace lines, crossovers, and stretching exercises. And a sort of push-up used when you were late back when the whistle was blown :-)
I was glad I'd done the skating I had, so I didn't *completely* embarrass myself. Some of the things I could do, sort of, some of them not but I got the idea. And you learn that your pads really do protect you, when you're throwing yourself at a concrete floor!
But I've got a long way to go. And not being an exercise sort of person, I'm going to have to work out how to get fitter at the same time as learning to skate and also keep up with the hungry derby newbies. The next thing for the group of people I've been meeting to skate, is to find somewhere indoors we can practice the techniques we learn between sessions - baseball slides probably not too popular at roller discos!
So that was pretty knackering. But still interesting and fun, plus the trainers were really good at the techniques they were demonstrating, and helpful and nice to me. Extra points to Katy Peril and Vigour Mortis for their help and suggestions.
After I got changed, and checked in with the head NSO (who's in charge of the non-skating officials for the bouts in the afternoon), I went to meet my skater friends in the pub for an hour, where we compared bruises and debriefed/decompressed.
Then it was back to the venue to prepare for the bouts. London Rollergirls have four teams - the Ultraviolent Femmes were playing the Harbour Grudges first, followed by a game between the Steam Rollers and the Suffra Jets. At 4 o'clock the doors opened, and the first bout started at 5.
The next few hours passed in a bit of a whirl. Both games were pretty evenly matched, and all teams were missing some key players due to injury, so it was quite exciting. I was timing penalties, which meant keeping an eye out for penalty calls and girls skating to the penalty box so you are prepared to time them sitting out. Which doesn't always mean you get to follow the actual game, because you're trying to handle your segment of it the best you can. On the other hand, you get the best seats in the house, between the two team benches and right between the jammer and pivot lines :-)
We had three people doing penalty timing - a manager who handled the jammers and handled the odd extra thing, and one person to do the two blocker seats for each team. If when a blocker skates in and all their team's seats are full, they have to go back out again and come in later to do their penalty.
The actual timing isn't really arduous - at 50 seconds you tell them to stand ("red 14 stand") and at a minute you tell them they're done ("red 14 done") and you stop the stopwatches between jams - but you could have one blocker standing, one blocker sitting and one just arriving to sit in the seat of the standing player, so it can get busy and you have to be alert. And if they leave before you've said "done", as one of the Steam Rollers did, they have to come back in for another minute plus the time they missed from the previous time. You have to get the referees' attention and get them to tell the player to come back in again. Also sometimes a referee will have given them two minutes, so you also have to be aware that the referee might be trying to communicate that to you while you're seating the player.
If you're on Facebook, there's a picture of me doing it here: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=500946758324
In the end the Harbour Grudges won 116-100, and the Steam Rollers won 112-105 - both really close games when you consider you could easily get 10-15 points in the last jam if the opposition jammer was in the penalty box.
And so to the afterparty, where I caught up with the Croydon girls and a few others I hadn't seen, and thanked my two trainers for helping me out earlier, and left about midnight, tired but happy as they say. Now to the hard part - training and learning the roller derby...