Tuesday, September 19, 2006 Sports cliches trotted out
On instant messenger the other day, a friend asked me how I was doing, and I told him all kinds of stuff. Then he asked, "So, how's stuff besides roller derby?" and I was like, "What do you mean?" Roller derby is a beautiful python, and I am merely a bulge in its belly.
I keep thinking about the last bout in amazement. I still can't believe it.
The way I look at it is that the Night Terors won, not that the Speed Regime lost. It was a close, hard-fought game, and as usual, the Regime played incredibly well. Losing to the Mods at Blind Rage was a turning point for us, I think. We started working hard as individuals and as a team to beat them in the playoffs, and we increased our momentum from there. In the past two months or so, three of us quit smoking and several more of us cut back dramatically.
I know I cut way back on drinking, and by extension, going to bars, and by further extension, secondhand smoking. Since Tracy moved out, I've been taking public transit and walking to get everywhere.
People on my team have gotten gym memberships (and started going to punishing fitness classes early in the mornings and on Saturdays). All of us started skating outdoors regularly, which gives you a workout and improved level of balance that you don't get skating on smooth wooden floor twice a week. For at least the past month, there have been about three Night Terrors a day going to Druid Hill Park to skate around the trails. Sometimes, we've had to get up early in the morning with the first wave of dog walkers and joggers and skate blearily around 'til we woke up.
We increased our attendance at practices, which, for some of my teammates who are back in school, involved moving the earth. We watched bout footage, which was humbling, especially our last bout against the Speed Regime. Watching yourself get knocked down to hard wooden floor to a "Boooooing!" sound effect is not something one expects to happen in one's adult life. My skating is awful on that DVD. Tottery and knock-kneed as a baby pony's walk, and about as fast and agile.
Once we got past the horrific sight of ourselves sucking out loud, though, we noticed a clear pattern of the way Speed Regime jammers were moving on the track. We also noticed flaws in our own defense that we'd known were there but hadn't been able to pinpoint, not to mention some overall patterns of play that seemed to hold true no matter which two teams were playing.
The week before the playoff game against the Mods, there was a lot of conflict on the team. It didn't help that I was big, walking, raw wound because of personal stuff, and that I damn near went door to door to alienate my teammates. After we got through that and won the playoff game anyway, I think we began talking to each other more, and goofing off at practices more, which helped us communicate better in the pack and work better together to knock other people down.
One of the reasons we worked so hard is because the Speed Regime is an incredibly good team, and we knew it would take incredible effort to win against them. I think, too, that from the start my team has felt a little like the underdogs. When the teams were first divided last winter, ours was one that had no coaches and no baord members. I don't think it was an intentional slight, but it illustrated that a lot of The Turquoise Team (as we were originally known) were not necessarily get-alongers, and none of us had fallen easily into a derby clique. We were the nerdy, artsy team. We had some of the smallest skaters on the league (including the sorely-missed Meanie Mouse). We took forever to decide anything. Our team theme alone was the result of weeks of bitter wrangling, due in part to the way we favored consensus rather than majority rule in our decision making.
I think in the end, this tendancy towards consensus is what helped us. Our last roster was a a group effort, where those of us who were able to make time to meet got together with some butcher paper and number 2 pencils and erased line-up after line-up until we found the ones that seemed right. We came up with plays together, and talked to the people whe knew would be in the pack with us.
My shtick for a long time has been that derby is a 24 hour sport about feelings, and I think that getting the "feelings" portion of the sport under control, along with all the training we did, is what helped us the most.
(crossposted to my other journal, because I am la-Z.) posted by Frenz | 9/19/2006 09:09:00 PM
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