Wednesday, June 24, 2009

So you wanna be a roller derby star, part II


The Dark Side: front: Queen Myradala (Myra Maines), Darth Mel (Mel Content), Darth Tater (Norma Lee Wright), Indy Sith (Indy Cent), Nina Millimeter. Back: Yvette YourMaker, Sargentina, Sonya MouthShut, Chuck Yeah!!!, Go-Go Hatchet, Sassy Squash, Anne Akin (Anne Arkie), Carnage Wilson (bench coach), Tori Adore.

Well, the bout was Saturday. It was a blast, I got to dress up as Darth Vader, I really liked the gals on the team, and it was very educational. Unfortunately, my theory proved wrong, or at least incomplete. We were outscored pretty significantly, which caused me to revise my view: I still think that a strong defensive team can shut down a good jammer, but, what I failed to take into account is, a good jammer is an individual, and a strong defense is a group that has to work together and all be on the same page strategically, so having a total of zero full-team practices pretty much precluded my defensive powerhouse of skaters from two different teams becoming a well-oiled machine by the time of the bout.

A friend of mine is working on a board game version of roller derby to be played with dice, and I've been thinking about the mechanics of the game. Something that may be unique to roller derby versus other sports is that both teams are playing offense and defense simultaneously. In most sports, there's a clear demarcation as to what role the players have at any given time---even if it may change often based on one team stealing the ball or puck from the other, at any given moment, the players are either on offense or defense. But in roller derby, any player can be doing either (or both) at any moment. It makes strategy a real challenge. I didn't have much opportunity to really talk strategy with the skaters but I'm hoping to do so in the future.

Now that the local league season is over, the All Stars take center stage. The Windy City Rollers are a league, and have multiple teams that play each other, but they also have a "travel team" made of the best players from all the local teams, and that team takes on the travel teams of other leagues around the country. The schedule has not been set yet but they will play a number of bouts over the remainder of the year, culminating with the national tournament in November.

This year brings a new twist. The All Stars are one of the top teams in the country, and are competitive with the best other leagues from major metropolitan areas. But there are a number of other leagues in smaller cities, or just less-established or less-accomplished, and it doesn't make sense from either perspective for the All-Stars to play those leagues' teams. Well, for the first time this season, the WCR is putting together an official second travel team, which will (a) provide an opportunity for WCR skaters to skate against teams they might not otherwise, and (b) give up-and-coming skaters experience in inter-league competition, and keep them skating competitively throughout the rest of the season.

Many of the Dark Siders, including Kelly (Mel Content) are going to be on the "B" team, so I am looking forward to their bouts. Of course I'm also looking forward to the All Stars bouts, too.

According to scuttlebutt, a number of prominent skaters will be retiring from the league after this season. Skaters seem to have a half-life in the league of about three or four years. I'm sort of amazed that skaters at the very top of their game would walk away, as seems to be happening in several cases if rumors are true, but I'm sure there are dynamics at work in the roller derby world that are unlike other sports---they are not paid, and to compete at the top level of the sport (and the really good skaters in the WCR are definitely there) places serious demands on a skater's time. Flat-track roller derby is relatively new and has changed a lot since it started (it was resurrected from the corpse of old-school banked-track roller derby in 2000, and just started in Chicago in 2004) and it's still evolving---this year is bringing a substantial revision to the rules. So perhaps the game is moving away from what brought some of the relative veterans into it. I have heard that over the first few years it became much more athletically-focused than when it started, but most of the reported retirees are excellent athletes, so I don't think that's it. I wonder if it may be a case of no more worlds left to conquer. It will be interesting to see if the next generation of skaters---the women who have been skating for just a couple years---stick with it longer, or if they start bowing out in another year or two.

In the mean time: it's been fun to be a fan, and it was fun to be a sort-of coach, and I'm eager to see what happens next. I know I'm not going to be a skater! Other than that, who knows?

Sunday, June 14, 2009

So you wanna be a roller derby star...

Followers of this blog may remember this post from last year, about my friend and bandmate Kelly joining the Windy City Rollers, the local roller derby league. (Or, you can read it now.) Since then I have indeed attended a number of bouts, along the way gaining a better understanding of how the sport works, and getting to know the skaters in the league (their on-track incarnations, anyway). It's been a lot of fun.

The WCR is an all-volunteer organization: everybody from the skaters, to the officials, to the stats people and scorekeepers, to the folks who set up and take down the track, donates his or her time because they like the sport and the league. I think it would be fun and interesting to get involved somehow but this year so far has been pretty hectic and weird, and I have not been in a position to commit the time to another activity. So, I've just been a fan. (They also serve who only sit and cheer.)

But then a few weeks ago I heard about something that sounded right up my alley. At the end of the local league season, the two top teams play for the coveted Ivy King Cup. Rather than having the other teams play a meaningless consolation bout, the skaters who are not on the teams playing in the championship go into a draft pool, and the league auctions off the opportunities to coach two teams that the winners get to draft from that pool. The proceeds go to help Tequila Mockingbird, a skater who was seriously injured a couple years ago. What a great chance to get involved, on a finite basis, learn more about the game, meet some interesting people (and they are an interesting bunch) and help out a good cause! So I bid on and won the chance to coach the black team in the black-vs-white scrimmage.

I'm posting this before the bout, but I figure the odds of anybody who (a) doesn't already know and (b) would have any surprises spoiled or (c) could give any advantage to the other team seeing this are vanishingly small, so...

I drafted a pretty solid team, I think---I went with defense over offense and I hope that turns out to have been an astute plan, but the girls seem confident and in the regular season there seemed to be some sort of correlation between how well the teams did and how strong their defense was. In some cases I went with spunk and verve over prominence and experience---I drafted gals that I stood out to me during the season for being in the middle of things and mixing it up. In anything like a draft, it's easy to think woulda-shoulda-coulda but in retrospect, the more I think about it, the happier I have been with this team---in just about every situation where I think back and ponder, "Well, I could have taken Skater X instead of Skater Y," I'm pretty happy now that I have Skater Y on my team---I wouldn't want to give her up to get Skater X, and that's really what it boils down to.

So we had to come up with a team concept, and there were a few floating around, and I came up with several, but the one the gals latched onto was "The Dark Side," with a Star Wars theme. Perhaps because I told them that if we went with that one I would wear a Darth Vader costume when we came out for the bout. In any event, a number of them took that idea and ran with it. Our opponents took the name "White Zombies", which I like to say is appropriate because they are dead, and just don't know it.

I went to scrimmage on Monday and met most of the women who will be on my team, and got a little taste of what it's like on the bench during a bout, as we went up against the Manic Attackers, one of the teams playing in the championship bout. I think I can get the hang of it eventually, but fortunately one of the veteran bench coaches from the Fury will be there to help with calling line-ups---we planned out line-ups that will hopefully be balanced and get everyone into the game, but once people start getting penalties, the set line-ups go out the window, and I'm not entirely sure how to deal with the ensuing chaos.

But I like my team, I think we have a very good chance of winning, and I think we are going to have a lot of fun in any event. One thing this has made me realize is how little I really grasped about strategy etc. even though I watched every bout this year. I will certainly be a more educated spectator going forward. And I wouldn't mind helping out on a more regular basis as a volunteer, if my life calms down enough to make that practical.

I'll post an update after the bout.

Monday, June 1, 2009

Just checking in

I note that it's been a while since I posted anything. When I started this blog, I was hoping to have approximately weekly posts, then I sort of settled for approximately monthly posts, which I justified to myself by trying to write longer, "essay" sort of posts rather than "Gee the weather is great today" type posts. But on the assumption that a few people check in here from time to time, I figured I ought to put something up to remind everyone that this blog is still a going concern.

It has been pretty hectic lately. Most significantly, my father-in-law, Paulis Anstrats, died on May 21. He had been pretty sick for several months and we all knew it was coming, just not exactly when. He was a neat guy, and I will miss him. He came over from Latvia after WWII and went from being a penniless refugee to a college professor---he taught German, world literature, and western civilization at DePaul for almost 30 years, but he retired in 1990 so I never knew Dr. Anstrats the professor, but he did love literature and words, and tended to illustrate his conversation with references to books. He was a smart, clever guy, and his coversations tended to be entertaining. He and my wife, his only child, were very close. He appreciated good beer and a nice Gewurztraminer or Riesling.

He died right before the Memorial Day holiday weekend, which pushed off the funeral activities for a few days, so we had more time than usual to fret over everything. This was my first experience preparing for a wake and funeral (when my sister died, her husband and his family handled just about everything, I think---in any event, I wasn't involved). There are certain elements of the funeral process that are a total racket, but actually, to a large extent, I think it is money well spent to pay a funeral director to deal with a lot of the details. But if I see this coming regarding myself or anyone else close to me, I will seek out a deal on a casket well before it's actually needed. In general I think the funeral people who handled my father-in-law's arrangements did a great job and I would not hesitate to work with them again, but I think my mother-in-law got taken to the cleaners with the casket.

Then, on the heels of all that activity, we had two friends come to visit over the weekend. I have a lot of great friends here in town, and I'm very grateful for that, but I've also had a lot of very good friends who have moved away. So it just so happened that two of them, to whom I had issued vague standing invitations to visit, came to town at the same time, and rather than have to tell one of them that we couldn't put them up, we had them both come over. I was a little concerned but they got along fine. So from Thursday night to Sunday morning we were pretty much on the go a lot, including a group outing to the Roller Derby Saturday night, which was a good call because both bouts were fantastic---in the first bout, we saw the no-longer-hapless Manic Attackers come back from a 45 point deficit to beat the defending-champ Hell's Belles, and in the second bout, the heretofore-winless Fury ("our" team by virtue of our friend Kelly (aka Mel Content) being a member) took control early on and managed to hold on and eke out a victory in the last bout of the season, which besided being a great bout (a real nail-biter) was great to see, and I'm glad we were there.

Then a few hours after our guests left, our book club met. This month's book was Lady Chatterly's Lover by D. H. Lawrence, which unfortunately I didn't get to read because, you know, I was sort of busy. But it prompted a pretty active discussion.

Meanwhile, another one of my friends has a kid who has taken up Magic: The Gathering, a game I once was a minor master of. So I'm hoping I can go visit them some time soon. And the Xylenes are working towards another performance---we found a single weekend in July when everyone seems to be available, so I sure hope we can get a gig set up then.

Not a dull moment around my house. I'm hoping for some, but I'm not sure when that can happen.