night owl scrimmaging is not for sissies.

Photo by David Costa

Last night was my first mixed-league scrimmage. I’ve scrimmaged with my leaguemates, but it’s different to get together with 50 girls from leagues all over the region. As it stands, only one other girl from my league came to this one, which was about an hour away from our town.

I try to make a habit of doing things on a regular basis that make me nervous–the good kind of nervous. And frankly, until I got in the car and started driving to the scrimmage, I was seriously considering staying home because I was definitely fighting some nerves. None of my girls were riding with me, so I was going solo. I’m no stranger to solo, but solo make it a lot easier to call things off. I didn’t know exactly what to expect, and I’ve only been skating a few months.

Thankfully, none of my excuses to myself panned out, and I found myself at a skating rink at 10pm on a Saturday night, lining up with a whole host of new friends, chatting about how we were looking forward to the first couple of jams to get our jitters out.

And get our jitters out we did. I even put on the jammer panty (the helmet cover that identifies the jammer) during my second jam of the night so I could get my jamming nerves to calm down. I figured this would be a really great venue for practicing jamming as much as possible, because we’ve got a lot of hotshot jammers on my home league so I don’t get to just practice super often.

(If you need a basic rundown of derby, check out the wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_derby)

My first sprawling fall of the night nearly knocked the wind out of me, but lucky for me I like to fall (think: gymnast, climber, skydiver…you get the picture) and all it really serves to do is fire me up. The whole night we just rotated through lineups, skating when we wanted to, rearranging teams when girls had to leave to go home. The beauty of a black and white scrimmage is that all you have to do to switch teams is put on a different color shirt.

I also love that in a scrimmage, every jam pretty much stands alone. No one is keeping score, so each new group starts fresh. The one thing about derby that I haven’t learned to love is the drama, and while I love skating with my own team and building those relationships, skating in a group of relative strangers totally minimizes interpersonal drama. Yeah, that girl I knee’d out of my way totally sent me sprawling out of retaliation, but it was still fun, and then forgotten.

The refs called things off when the skaters started to get sloppy because we were so tired. Three hours of late-night skating can take it out of you, that’s for sure. And when girls skate sloppy, people get hurt, so it was a good call on the part of the refs to call it a night.

After a short night of sleep and a church service, today has been a day of ibuprofen, adding new friends on facebook, and checking out pictures from the scrimmage. I’m still new enough to this sport that I’m not agonizing over every mistake I made (not that that’s really my modus operandi anyways) so the whole thing was just fun. I’m glad I didn’t stay home.

Tomorrow’s the cross-town burrito-eating race with my leaguemates, so there is more derby fun to be had before tryouts in a few weeks. I’m so glad to be back on skates with some regularity. Off-season was good for my joints, but pre-season is great for my spirit.