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.