feeownah.

And we want to bout,
The positions are stirring, we’re full of doubt.
The stockings were picked by each skater with care,
With hopes that a position would soon be there’s.

The skaters are nestled all snug in their beds
While visions of new strategies dance in their heads.
And Stabba in her PJ’s and I in the nip,
Have settles our brains to dream we don’t slip!

When out on the track there’ll be such a clatter
I’ll spring with my knees and minor elbows won’t matter.
Away to the sin bin I’ll fly like a flash
Tear open the 4 walls & block with a bash

Can-openers to the breast of new zebra Snow
And then I got bored.

Eeep tryouts tomorrow!!

Although the start to my 2013 has been on the sluggish side (I’m trying to get rid of the plague), I’m feeling pretty damn optimistic about this year. I don’t mean that in a ‘2013 is going to kick 2012’s ass/I’m going to be 200% more productive/I’m going to climb Mt Everest/I’m going to save €500 a week/etc kind of way. I mean it in a simple kind of way.

I’m going to make the time to do the stuff I ‘haven’t had time for’.

There’s enough time in the day to get shit done, whether it’s doing some exercise (I joined a new gym that’s a hell of a lot cheaper and a million times easier to get to, I have no excuse not to go), see non-derby friends (or derby friends outside of derby), go to the cinema, finally get my driver’s license, read more, start writing again, make mixtapes.

For the last four months or so, work has had me pretty busy and stressed and it was taking away from my outside-of-work life in the evenings, so my ‘resolution’ for 2013 is to reclaim my outside of work time. (:

I’m really looking forward to skating under the new rules set. Minors are so nitpicky and it’s silly to be punished for barely moving somebody in a contact sport.

I’ll miss being able to successfully pull of a penalty kill by bridging, but in fairness the opportunity arises rarely in competitive games so there’s not much to miss.

I think overall the updated rules are making it easier for people watching the sport for the first time. How many times have you sat with people who are watching a bout for the first time and you get caught up explaining why a blocker has been sent of for four minors, when the spectator can’t even see the minor penalty that happened because it had such little impact. 

The one rule I find rather odd is:

8.2.1 - A Jammer may score a Jammer lap point on their initial pass.

I’m guessing this means that if the pack laps a Jammer who’s been taken out, but the opposing Jammer hasn’t made her initial, she gets the lap point? I’d like to have it clarified though!

Either way, I’m looking forward to giving the rules set a bash! (:

shadowofbeth:

SO EFFING MUCH

I stayed up on Friday night watching Championships with Shref, VB & Kitty before getting up after 2 hours sleep to head to Birmingham to watch our B team playing the Blitz Dames. Flights at 6.15 just aren’t fun. When we got to Birmingham we got breakfast, arts & craft supplies and Krispy Kremes before heading to the venue. While the team were doing their thing, myself, Kitty, Stabba and Cillian made signs for each of the skaters which was pretty fun. 

Then, with a cider in hand, we watched the first game which was us against Blitz Dames’ B team. It was a great game, so exciting to watch our B team playing so well. They’ve only played a couple of games this year, and this is the first since the new team was picked at try outs. They worked really well together with great team work and derby smarts. I was really happy for Katnip who has been injured the last AGES and got to play. She was heartbroken after not being able to skate in Berlin, but she was back on form yesterday :D Also Werdz got to IPR for the first time, which was pretty cool (:

After the game we watched the Bristol -v- Birmingham A game. I’m not gonna lie, I was disappointed that our A team wasn’t able to travel to play the A team but watching the game with a few Kopparbergs was pretty fun and exciting to watch (:

We got home at about 11.30 and I stupidly tried to stay up and watch the Gotham - Denver game >_>

And now I’m going to pester Shref into making me tea :D

derbyref:

STORY OF MY BOUT DAY.

shadowofbeth:

Blue Ridge Has Amazing Blockers!

apricunt:

derbyref:

L O L

EVERY TIME! I was penalty box timing a scrimmage with a load of our rookies a few weeks back and this happened. When the girl came into the box looking so confused I explained why she was sent off and I could almost see lights going off behind her eyes as she realised.

.. listing of 3 good things and 3 things I need to work on based on my bout performance on Saturday.

Sadly I can’t write one because I did a whole lot of nothing during the bout. My head was not in the game at all due to pre-bout shenanigans. I don’t even remember most of the game and I was pretty much ineffective. At half time I spoke to my captain, co-captain & line-up manager and told them I was being ineffective and that I have no problem being pulled from rotation if needed. I worked it so that I volunteered to stay on the bench whenever someone was in the box - which was 90% of the second half jams. 

I am proud of myself that I was able to deal with my un-performance really calmly. I wasn’t emotional or begrudging anyone or getting upset. Yay for a positive!

I can however write a blog post about scrimmage on Sunday. It was just rookies and B team skaters there 8 of us in total so we played with packs of 3. I don’t really feel that analysing my performance on how often I got lead or held back a jammer would be a fair judgement of skills when I was the only A team skater on the track. However with derby there are always other things that I can critique:

Needs work:
1. 10ft. A couple of times Cian called no pack and I looked at the distance between myself and the opposing team and thought ‘there is definitely pack still for another foot or so!’ and scowled and made faces. However, the truth is, I’m not exactly known for my good concept of distance. This was also very evident during power jam situations.Whoopsies!

2. Stop scowling and making faces at calls I disagree with. I don’t back talk to refs usually (everyone slips up and yells ‘what’ or ‘no’ from time to time, right?) but I’ve noticed myself making a lot of faces lately and I would like to not do this so much (:

3. Getting lower when hitting

Good things!

These might not seem that awesome but I don’t usually jam so I was really proud of my awareness & smart tactics!

1. I ate the baby as a jammer which made me really happy and meant I got another scoring pass!

2. Several times I burned penalty time for my blockers in the box when jamming by waiting till the last second to call off the jam.

3. I had the awareness to defensive jam straight off the line when we were down to 1 blocker on the track and the opposition had 3. It worked and I managed to find a hole and get out and get lead after holding back the other jammer.

I really enjoyed scrimmage yesterday, especially after a pretty tense Saturday! (:

It’s bout day!! I’m the usual bag of nerves, excitement, glitter and pad stink!

Last night I was at travel team train. During scrimmage, I had my wheels kicked from behind so I landed on my arse, full-force shouldered in the jaw (that one freakin’ hurt) and a series of other hits and bumps that have me a little on the achey side of today. This isn’t a blog post about getting a shoulder driven full-force to the face and how I can’t believe she wasn’t called on it.

Really though refs, why wasn’t she called on it?

Well the fact of the matter is, maybe her initial contact was perfectly legal and I had that part knocked out of my memory when shoulder impacted above the neck. Or maybe the ref was looking at her elbows to make sure they weren’t nudging me illegally. Or maybe my own body was blocking the ref’s view of the aforementioned shoulder giving my face a loving nuzzle. Or maybe the ref was looking at something completely different. Either way, refs aren’t going to catch everything. Every hit we land isn’t going to be legal, sadly and sometimes we do make contact outside the legal blocking zone and sometimes we’re not called on it.

We’re playing a full contact sport, legal and illegal contact happens and we all have to suck it up and not get in a huff over it. There’s no point in ranting at the skater who blocked you outside of the legal blocking zone, or out of play, or illegally because this shit happens. It’s a lot more important to suck up the nasty hit and continue on your way to winning the jam.

My God the cupcakes are amazing!

I broke my jamming virginity (in a bout) on Sunday! I think everyone jammed at some point, but I jammed once and I got out of the pack and made the other jammer call it off! True, it was after her second or third pass, but I still did it! And considering who we were playing, I think that’s saying something! The blockers in my pack did some really good offense when the oppossing jammer wasn’t in the pack to get me out, thank goodness! Also, I may have false started (oh yeh, those second set of whistles actually apply to me when I’m jamming!) but I remembered to yield correctly and then didn’t pick up any more minors while jamming.

I’d call that a success (:

Last weekend we travelled to Edinburgh to play against Auld Reekie’s B team the Cannon Belles. It involved a super early flight Saturday morning, a team brunch and some off skates warm ups which ended in us screaming and charging the width of the hall, which was pretty fun. The venue was pretty cool and the Auld Reekie girls were lovely (they even supplied our changing room with Buck’s Fizz and jellie!). It was a pretty humid weekend and the hall wasone of the hottest I’ve ever skated in. I don’t know why I started writing a blog post about this bout since I don’t really want to talk about it, let alone blog about it. I didn’t really enjoy the game, despite our team winning (this is no reflection on ARRG at all - just on a personal level).

Afterwards Cherry Fury got us all in taxis to the after party where we all sat outside having drinks. Sadly most of us had to leave early enough as we weren’t staying in Edinburgh that night (the Fringe festival had most hotels/hostels sold out/super expensive).

Most of us played a closed bout the next day (I’m not sure if I’m allowed say who it was against or not) and I enjoyed it a lot more. The team are in a division above us and were amazingly strong. Sadly we were without 3 of our primary jammers and one of our key blockers (we played the Cannon Belles with 12 skaters, and the closed bout with 10). Despite missing such key players, I really enjoyed the game. We lost, but we didn’t give up and in the second half they didn’t score nearly as much points and we scored more points. It was a tough game, I sweated a whole lot and I think it was well worth playing - even if some other people would disagree.

My lack of training lately showed in my games this weekend. I’ve been away for a few weekends and missed Sunday trainings, I don’t train on Wednesdays any more since it’s aimed at rookies and I don’t want to take up their track time - our halls on Wednesday’s is quite small. That leaves Mondays. I’ve missed a Monday or two due to personal reasons and I didn’t skate last Monday due to hurting my shoulder at a bootcamp at the weekend. So, although there’s reasons why I’ve missed a lot of training I really need to get my ass into gear. I want to start hitting the gym again and this month I’ve promised myself I’ll look into pilates. My back hasn’t been the same since it started hurting during my last set of bouts in June so I need to strengthen it up. Try outs (again!) will be happening in the next two months and I don’t want to have gotten worse since the previous tryouts.

I say all this when I’m not making training this Sunday or Monday! But at least I have the excuse of I’m heading to Chaos on the Clyde, so I’ll be watching derby and taking notes (yes I am bringing a notebook).

So I spent the weekend in Birmingham watching the first ever Men’s European Roller Derby Championships. There were some pretty fucking intense bouts and some amazing players! I’ve never really watched much men’s derby before, just clips here and there, but I’ve taken to describing it as women’s derby on cocaine. There’s a hell of a lot more skating, hitting and falling involved in it and it’s great to watch. Watching the 2nd-v-3rd place (Quad Guards vs New Wheeled Order) semi-final I kind of fell in love with NWO. They were down by a good bit 3/4 way through the first half but they were still trying their hardest and it really paid off and brought it to the Quad Guards - it was such a brilliant game to watch! Quad Guards have this ridiculous jammer called Mr Furioux who is crazy good. However I really liked NWO blocker Darth Sebious - he had an amazing ability to hit a skater out and stay in bounds, toe stops touching the line but not going over. Plus if he was beaten at the back of the pack, chances were he was going to sprint to the front of the pack to hit out the other jammer, stay in bounds just to sprint back to the back of the pack - it was awesome.

The 3/4 place game was also really exciting - full of lead changes with Sheffield pulling away right at the end to take 3rd over NWO. :( I think NWO were a bit more tired after pouring so much into the previous game.

The Championship game was just RIDICULOUS. Power Jam after power jam left Southern Discomfort constantly chipping away at Qaud Guards lead, until they caught up before giving away another couple of power jams. The final few jams were so tense! Noise Tank for SD was sent to the penalty box on a cutting major (looked more like a no pass no point from where we were at the other end of the track, so we couldn’t tell if it was a good or bad call). SD went in and questioned it at the end of the jam and Noise Tank was released. With 4 points in the difference and it looking like SD had scored 4 points but were only given 2 (QG had 2 in the box and Reaper had apex jumped passed the 2 on the track…). I’m not too sure what actually happened but the game was whistled dead with QG winning by 2. Ballistic Whistle came into the centre and the head ref called an official (SD’s official review had already been used up by this point). And with something like 6seconds on the scoreboard clock another jam was started with SD getting lead, getting 4 points and calling it off to win. DRAMA! For the record this review is what I saw - I’m probably missed stuff so I’m not really sure what the hell happened in those last few jams, but it was some of the most exciting derby I’ve ever seen. Was dissappointed to hear that the QG fans turned their backs on SD during the victory laps.

Our A and B teams were picked this week! I was on the selection panel (of 9) and got to help pick the teams and 2 alternates for each team. Some of the decisions were so tough and there was a lot of discussion over some of the places. It’s hard trying to pick the balance between mental attitudes and skating abilities. Luckily I made the A team again (and no, not becaues I’m on the selection panel, I swear!) whcih means that i’m playing Auld Reekie (B) and a closed game against a Div. 1 team in two week’s time! Flights and accomodation are booked! I also just booked flights to Glasgow the following weekend to watch the Chaos on the Clyde tournement - I’m excited! :D

Not to mention this Saturday is Zombie Walk! DRG are getting zombiefied and collecting money for charity, hopefully if the weather holds out we’ll be able to skate too! (:

So all in all, derbyderbyderbyderby!

That today I did 3 laps in 28 seconds and 50 in 8 mins 40 seconds during try outs? I think that is pretty darned good!