SWAT ROLLER DERBY

Saturday 25th October 2014 There was no training today. It was bout day!! Unfortunately, Insane Bolt's puppy managed to eat the line-ups on the morning of the bout... The SWAT A team were taking on the Bristol A team in an exciting double header. Of course, a team of freshies travelled up to Bristol to support (I say support, mainly gawp and gaze in awe). The first bout was between Bath and Neath Port Talbot. Having watched lots of derby previously, I found myself explaining

Saturday 18th October 2014 The floor at training was horrible today!! We train in a sports centre, so the floor is usually pretty good to skate on, but due to the bad weather, it was slightly wet and slippery in certain places. A lot of the advanced skaters couldn’t make it because of flooding, so we had more room, but had to cordon off a section of the hall. I hit a couple of wet bits and slipped over a few times, so didn’t go as fast as I usually would. This was the first s

Saturday 11th October 2014 Today was the speed and stride session with the whole league. Dot Slash was teaching us the correct form aka ‘derby stance’ (basically, get as low as you can and then a little bit lower) before teaching us crossovers. Derby stance wasn't particularly comfortable, but Dot said that it was meant to hurt as we weren't used to using those particular muscles. There were many steps to help us learn our crossovers and I found that I struggled with most of

Saturday 4th October 2014 Today was the first day I managed to walk in without my hood up!! (yes, I was hiding behind my hair, but that is not the point!!) <== Hair shield!! See it's not as if it's covering my whole face!!! (I hate selfies) We did a warm up with the advanced skaters and a few of the skills included in this, were ones we hadn't done before. One of these was skating backwards!!! I'm not sure quite where to start on this, but I was having enough trouble going fo

Saturday 27th September 2014 First thing I noticed this week was the lack of advanced skaters at training today. This didn’t make much of a difference in the first half of the session though. We started by recapping knee taps, sticky skating (with the added crossing over of the skates from last week), balancing on one leg and then T stops. I was a lot better at the T stops this week, but still breathed a sigh of relief when we moved onto plow stops. They’re definitely my favo

Saturday 20th September 2014 The last two sessions had been induction sessions, but today we officially started the 16 week fresh meat program. (Eeeek!!) We recapped knee taps, sticky skating and T stops. I finally felt I was getting somewhere with the T stops (whoop whoop!) and we were told to practice them on both sides. Being ambidextrous, I didn’t seem to have a bad side as such, which advanced skater Pimm’s O’Block didn’t seem to think was fair. I did however point out t

Saturday 13th September 2014 So last week, I had my Mum to hide behind. This week I didn’t. I managed to drive to the right place, at the right time, without getting lost! (I usually make a few unexpected detours and U turns when I’m not 100% sure where I’m going.)I was then brave enough to walk into the building all by myself!! (Yes, I was hiding under my hood and behind my hair and waited in the car until I saw some other nervous looking people go in, but I still managed it

Saturday 6th September 2014 Today was the first day of fresh meat. It was SO SUPER SCARY, but so worth it! I had to hide behind my Mum on the way in. She collected all the forms for me, I filled them in and then got her to hand them back for me. What was I afraid of? I’d like to say that everyone was really big and scary and fierce, but that wasn’t the case. Everyone was so nice that I was almost afraid they wouldn’t like me, not something that really ever bothered me before,