After eight years, I finally made it to the Big Show. It wasn’t the Big Big Show because my team didn’t qualify for Division 1 this year. But, still. It was a WFTDA tournament with some teams and players I had been watching for years, along with relative newcomers — including, thrillingly, a bevy of international teams — I had never seen play. It was an especially exciting year at a tournament that tends toward the fiercely competitive. So many upsets and close matches occurred. I don’t think anyone expected my team to do as well as we did, but (spoiler alert!) we broke a bunch of brackets and went home with medals. I had gone to D1 playoffs in Vancouver the year before…
Reflections on roller derby
Posts from the “derby-life balance” Category
January was a stressful, overwhelming month for me, in roller derby and in life. I took over the PR Committee for my league, just as we were gearing up to open our historic 10th anniversary season. I carried on my job of helping out the interleague committee, along with stepping up to manage my team of five at work after my boss got promoted to a different department. We put together a weekly digital magazine, so there’s no real ebb in our workflow. I doubt many would consider me a drama maven, but there were tears, there were serious threats to quit everything, there were fantasies of moving to a remote cabin in the woods. Part of this tornado of responsibilities and pressures led…
When I was a young punk kid spending my weekends at grungy basement shows, there was a local band that played a song with a lyric that said: “There’s a great big world beyond the scene.” The words resonated and stuck with me over the years — although the concept later seemed obvious, I periodically needed reminding. At the time, I needed to expand my focus outside the literal scene they were talking about, but the idea also applied to other scenes in which I became entrenched in subsequent years. Activism, journalism, roller derby. After a season that for whatever reason ground me down both mentally and physically, I needed some time to make derby a lesser priority. That’s not to say I completely marginalized it. I went to…
Categories: derby-life balance
I thought it did. For a minute. Actually, it was much longer than a minute. A couple of years, really. A good stretch of time, and it didn’t start the minute I strapped on a pair of skates. Unlike many of my peers, I came around to derby slowly and didn’t experience some kind of immediate, amazing life transformation like others seemed to. But, over time, roller derby did have a huge positive impact, which I’ve taken pains to document here. But it did not fix everything. These past few months I’ve needed all the advice I’ve published on Call the Jam — go to practice, get out of your derby rut, let go and have fun, stop criticizing yourself and on and on. I…
All work and no practice makes Vivi a dull girl. Well, dull is probably not quite right, but it makes her a very restless, anxious girl. Our league scheduled a break around the holidays — it might have been the longest consecutive time we’ve gone without practicing since I started derby. As part of the league’s board of directors, I approved this, while inside I was screaming: “Nooooooooooo!” What was I going to do without practicing for more than two whole weeks?! This might sound like insanity. But it’s actually the opposite. Practice is what keeps me sane. A forced break is probably not a bad thing, especially for someone like me. I confess, it was nice to be able to have a few…
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…