The Tuesday following our March 27th debut against San Diego and Circle City, we arrived at the Cincinnati Gardens hungry for derby and eager for a team reboot. Scrimmage all you want, but there’s nothing quite like full-tilt, “real thing” competition to identify what you like and what you loathe about your personal game.
Not only were we ready to work; we were pumping ourselves up for some punishment. What drills and skills would be our weapons of choice to set the tone for our lead up to April 17th against Arch Rival?
I turned over all manner of possibilities:
An extra minute of squat/sprint repeats for every major penalty incurred?
Pyramids ’til failure for every point scored against us?
Extended and acute agility agony?
Wrong, and wrong. And wrong again. We worked hockey stops.
Hockey stops are not included on the list WFTDA Minimum Skills Requirements that aspiring skaters must execute to be eligible to join a league, but they are useful in derby for a number of reasons. One of the most salient applications is that you can employ a hockey stop to prevent yourself from skating out of bounds behind your victim, in moments when you execute an attack to the outside. A hockey stop not only helps you to abridge your forward momentum; it also turns you away from the outside rope, and inward toward the track to meet any opposing rogue hitters who might be interested in hitting you out of bounds with a no-lookie. Sounds great, right?
It is.
But buying into the idea and executing the move are two different things.
The resulting scene: forty women skating the oval at a pack-speed clip, listening for Quad Almighty’s single repeated whistle blasts that signaled *hockey stop time* (chooo choo…all aboard)!
Our efforts looked, for all the world, like a Mighty Ducks training montage. Like, one of the “first practice” ilk.
(Cue punnily-titled musical accompaniment.)
Each blast was followed by some combination of skidding wheels, feminine squeals, muttered expletives, and myriad resounding thuds. Again. And again. And again. And… you catch my drift.
A qualification: lots of our skaters have certainly mastered the hockey stop at earlier points in their derby careers, so it would be inaccurate to say that we were all in the exact same boat, struggling in just the same way. But what makes this incident worthy of reflection for me is how both rookies and vets were placed in a parallel moment of learning. Picking up kinesthetic skills, breaking them down and figuring out how to make your body do them, is an internal and rather personal process. So the sight of forty women, simultaneously but individually dedicated to those same moments of repetitive trial-and-error learning, was inspiring and unusual, remarkable and absurd to watch all at once.
Selections from those moments: Executing a plow and wheeling around while windmilling my arms wildly, I spin out and land hard on one knee just in time to watch my Sheep neighbor turn a full, graceful, slow-mo circle, winding up backwards on her toestops. Neither display is what either of us have intended, obviously, but our eyes happen to meet and we dissolve into peals of cursing laughter. Looking further down the track, another of my cohort struggles with keeping her skates planted, tripping and skipping her way to a stuttering stop against the back of her fully-stopped buddy; a Lamb to my right slaloms back and forth, turning her skates and feeling the hockey stop motion…until she loses track of the rope and belly flops with considerable pomp, inciting a multi-skater pileup.
Ultimately, that post-bout practice wasn’t the brutal endurance workout that we’d expected, but it was humbling in a remarkable and powerful way. Lacing up the following day, there were lots and lots (and lots) of complaints about about bootie/body soreness. I heard frustration at being bested by a fundamental skill, a great deal of self-criticism, and inquiries about who had successfully “gotten it.” But embedded in every one of those remarks were spurts of desire, determination to nail it, ambitious, tenacious vows to work the skill again and again and again, speculation about how we could train our bodies to execute perfectly, every time. Whatever it was that was being said, we couldn’t not talk about hockey stops. We were enflamed and obsessed.
As a lovestruck rookie, I am naturally filled with a healthy dose of naïve awe at the talent that skaters in my league possess. I appreciate, on a weekly basis, how they exploit their unique skills and think actively through our strategies on the track. And I deeply admire the swagger with which we view and attack the challenges that this sport presents us with, both team and personal. It’s abundantly clear that I get to enjoy a derby childhood and adolescence surrounded by teachers, heroes, and role models I can model my game after.
But ultimately it is the group obsession with learning exemplified by the scenario I’ve related above, the thirst to combine body and mind to just effin’ get it right, that makes me burstingly proud of this league and this sport—above all of those other strengths.
And while the charms of new sport experiences may be part of what leads multijocks like me to something like roller derby, it is the example of these moments of universal learning—the idea that we can all be reborn as hungry, obsessive rookies, again and again for as long as we play—that keep me dying for more.