What an outpouring of kindness and love I received after my last post! That was unexpected. I admit I cried a few times while writing it, but I felt almost immediately better having set those words down and sent them off into the world. It was cathartic, I think, just to express what had been percolating under the surface for months. Not to say that everything is now fixed. That would be naïve. But I did manage to go into our last competition with the attitude that I was going to have fun no matter what happened. At the end of the last team practice on Thursday before our bout, we sat around in a sweaty circle and told everyone a word representing what…
Reflections on roller derby
Posts from the “bouts” Category
[….] We caught up with [name redacted], a skater with a roller derby league in [city redacted] who is on the cusp of finishing her fourth season on the flat track. [Name redacted] writes a blog about her experiences with derby, but we haven’t heard much about her season or the specific games her team played this year, so we were thrilled to connect for a recap. Interviewer: I’m glad I could catch you right at this moment, after the conclusion of your home bouting schedule, with just a single match remaining before your off-season. It seems like a good time to review some of the highs and lows of your derby experience this year. Skater: Absolutely. I mean, I’m not sure why…
There is something transformative about the act of a high five. Seriously. Find the nearest person to you and hold up your hand with a smile on your face and see what happens. Lately my team has been talking a lot about our goals, both as individuals and as a team. Not just general goals – “I want to be a better jammer” – but quantifiable ones we can examine after we bout. How often am I going to get lead jammer? How few times will I go to the box? How many times will I execute a certain skill or strategy per period? It’s an excellent exercise — clarifying some of my personal goals and also becoming aware of my teammates’ goals…
We all have our reasons we joined roller derby, but is there any one among us who didn’t strap on skates at the very beginning because they thought it would be fun? Whether you wanted to get in shape, toughen up your image, make new friends, spend some time on roller skates, you thought at least some of it would be fun. Even if you were scared shitless, you knew on some level it would be a blast. Isn’t it ironic then how often so many of us forget how to have fun in derby? We get caught up in criticizing ourselves for our own inadequacies. We think about how we sucked at practice, we missed the jammer, we got stuck in the pack,…
Categories: bouts, derby philosophy
I fell. I couldn’t get up. I hadn’t planned to write this post about injury, but then I got hurt. It was like jumping off a merry-go-round, like turning the sound off during the most dramatic part of a movie, like plunging to the bottom of a public pool on a busy summer day. The sights and sounds of the world collapsed around that single point of pain. The pain became a black hole, sucking everything else in. The jam was called. I was sprawled in the ref lane, unable to move. Per derby custom, skaters and refs took a knee. The medics converged on me. They started removing my skates and asking me questions, which I did not want to answer because…
The last time I won a trophy it had a fish on top of it. The year was 1985 and I had managed to defend my 1984 title of children’s champion in the annual fishing contest on Lake Memphremagog in Newport, Vermont. I was quite the angler in my youth. I’m sorry to say that my two championship fishing trophies did not survive one of my many moves over the past fifteen years or so. Otherwise I’d be displaying them on my mantle along with the handmade MVP jammer trophy I won last weekend. It’s a small thing, winning an award for playing one position in one bout, and further, a post-season travel match that turned out to be a slam dunk for my…
Confession: I cried all the way home from the afterparty. That’s like a half-hour of highway driving through tears. It wasn’t our 114-107 squeaker of a loss, though I won’t pretend that wasn’t a disappointment. It wasn’t any drunken after-party drama either. It was just that the whole thing was over. Since sometime in July, I’d been bracing myself, knowing the last Socialites game would be a heartbreaker for me, whether we won it or not. When I was in high school, I had an odd habit of setting my alarm clock for the middle of the night. The bleating of my Sony Dream Machine would rouse me from my teenage slumber, whence I would reset the alarm for whatever ungodly hour I needed to…
I’m a writer so naturally I procrastinated until bout day to sew this on. So proud to wear this with my team tonight. It feels like the beginning of a new era for us.
Categories: bouts
Some girls on my league have their first bout tonight and I’m going to miss it. I’m in Chicago to celebrate my aunt’s 65th birthday. You know, achieving that derby-life balance thing. Sort of. I already requested text updates from friends who are attending. I got to thinking about my first bout this week. I had to be cajoled into participating — it was a fresh meat showcase in a rust belt city about four hours away, which was probably a blessing because no one I know needed to see it. To put it very mildly, I did not know what the fuck I was doing. I had joined league about five months earlier and things were not clicking. The rules, the strategy, everything…
Dear teammates, especially those on the roster for June 16, 2012, I am writing this letter because I have a confession to make. It pains me to admit this, but I think I did not believe in you. When I say “you,” I include myself. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that I did not believe in us. We faced a really hard team last Saturday. It was a team that beat us two times before — the first year badly, the second year soundly. I’ll never forget playing them in their city two hours south last summer in a crowded, seedy, humid roller rink. The opposing blockers pummeled our jammers as theirs handily lapped our defense. I vividly recall getting…