derbypursuit:

sea-froth:

derbypursuit:

3/5/11 Sorby!!! HRD Redwood Rollers v BAD Oakland Outlaws (by LeVar Hurtin’ (IGP PHOTO))

Oh man, so! The Outlaws went up to Humboldt/Eureka to play the Redwood Rollers, and their bout was rained out — after about twenty minutes in the first bout, they determined the floor was too slick to skate on, so the girls played Sock Derby instead.

I love my BAD Girls. <3 Also, this sounds like so much fun! And I think it would be a fun way for new girls to learn the rules of roller derby while they’re still in the awkward stage on their skates and want to just concentrate on the rules of gameplay for a little while. Alternately, it might be a fun public fundraiser, or half-time show for derby fans.

Hopefully when I finally get to start training in a group I can bring this up.

Usually we do have fans running around the track at halftime!

We did it as a drill once right before the rinky dink debut scrimmage; Ho had us gear up in everything (helmets, pads, etc.) and running shoes, then we ran around the track. She’d yell for us to freeze at certain points to look at our positioning and pack formation. I know it helped a lot of things click — there’s definitely a difference between seeing strategy and pack work, and in implementing it yourself.

The main focus of the pre-tryout classes, though, is to get you confident in your skating skills and out of that awkward stage, and to get you prepared for tryouts. There’ll be some mini-scrimmages at tryouts, but they really don’t expect you to know the WFTDA rule details and strategies at that point. As long as you know the “this is the pivot, this is the pack, this is the jammer, don’t go out of bounds, this is an illegal hit” basics, you’ll be fine until after tryouts.

lemme just say that I LOVE MY LEAGUE. this was my my first bout and i only got to skate for about 17 minutes before we decided it was sock derby time. oakland and reno were such good sports about it. at the end of the day derby’s all about having fun with or without skates!