After a solid weekend of derby and hockey, I *think* my legs might be justified in being sore for the next week or two. Okay, on to the exciting news.
The BC Rollers acquired their very own practice space last week! This is HUGE news for their league, as they had been commuting an hour each way to their former practice space. That translated to a 6-hour time commitment each practice for many skaters and they've been struggling to maintain membership. Growing the league's membership numbers was simply proving impossible due to such a large time commitment.
I was scheduled to coach Sunday's practice, so I had to get into the space ASAP to figure out what I really had to work with. Cleaning party Saturday AM? That's a GREAT time to see the space and get to see a few skaters at the same time. So that's where I was, bright and early on Saturday morning. I popped my freshly-washed bearings back into my wheels and away I went (with a very large cup of coffee in hand.) I took a few laps around the track to test the floor and soon wandered into the bathroom where the cleaning party was hard at work.
I got to know the hallway wall a bit more intimately than I wanted to when I discovered that there's a dip in the floor as you're coming out the bathroom. Remember that nice cup of coffee I had? Generally, doing a 180 while skating through the bathroom door and holding a conversation is something I'm perfectly comfortable with and able to accomplish without incident. Hitting that dip... well... I maintained my up-right position AND my hold on my coffee cup, but the wall behind me got splattered with flying coffee when I whacked my (still un-padded) elbow on the wall. *sigh*
The day's lone Junior derby skater arrived for practice not long after I had my little incident in the hallway. After cleaning up my mess, I joined in on the very first practice held in the new space. Dodgeball and floor hockey on roller skates? Fantastic. We eventually ended that practice with a sweep and partial mop of the floor. The official opinion of the junior skater is that mopping is fun when you're allowed to do it on roller skates. A drop-in visit from a CCR skater, then it was off to hockey practice for me.
Sunday brought more hockey and derby with an away hockey game and a (short) 2-hour practice for the BC Rollers. It was a particularly fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants practice with skaters of all experience levels out on the track and lots of excitement in the air due to being in the league's new home space. We even had the help of Rusty Nailher's four-legged companion, Cowboy, for tennis ball keep-away and obstacle avoidance practice. (I hope I didn't scare the fresh meat away with that one...)
The hockey game ended in a tie (2-2) despite our having a crazy number of shots on net. A fun thing with the team this year is that we've got four current/former derby players on the team. Usually I and another derby gal are both centers so that we're rarely on the same line-up together, but I'd requested to be wing for this particular game. I was paired up with one of the other derby gals as my wing partner and we were rotating three wing pairs and two centers through on the offensive line. Normally the other center and I "find" each other on the ice as we each skate backwards in a half-circle at a fairly decent speed and INTO each other. (Hence the reason for never putting us on the same line-up!) We've been working on staying out of each others' lane of travel for the past year or so and that effort finally seems to have paid off as we successfully completely the game without ANY collisions. Whoot!
Our three derby girls who were up on offense also happen to all be jammers. So roughly every other time my partner and I were skating, we had a full offensive line of roller derby jammers. Yeah jammer line! This made for some super-fun weaving, cycling and scrambling in front of the net as we all found each other with our passes and kept attacking the opposing team's goalie from all sides.
I *believe* my wing partner got both goals and I got one assist. I'm still not quite sure how the goalie managed to stop all the shots that were happening on the other lines, but somehow she pulled it off and kept the game to a tie. My hat's definitely off to her for that and to her teammates for tying us up in front.
I'm looking forward to this coming week's version of hockey and derby!
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