This changes everything

Last wed I skated with the Gotham Girls of NYC. It was incredibly different from what we are doing in the Bay Area. Not because of anything more then them having been around for a year longer... but drastically different none the less. I hardly know where to start.

First. They have refs. The refs are unpaid volunteers who come to every practice and set up the track, they ref the practice jams, they are willing derby-man-slaves. This may seem like no big deal, but having refs at practice *defiantly changes everything*. At B.A.D. we have to set up our own track, and we have to use cones. Not only does this take about 20 minutes out of our practice time, you can skate in and out of a cone track with ease, creating a breeding ground for accidental-out-of-bounds-cheating. We set the track up after we do drills, so our drills are rarely preformed on the actual track.

Second. They have very (it seems) established chain of command. Not necessarily hierarchical. But there are girls in charge of specific departments. The girl who is head of coaching was conducting stretching whilst in the foreground there was a girl having a mini-meeting about having roping on the outside of the track. If girls started slacking off with the stretching you heard: "Stretch while you talk ladies!" Not that we don't have a chain of command... but the Gotham Girls seem to have it more honed then we do... they seem to be able to multi-task in ways we can only dream of.

Third. They have teams. We just formed teams... so I barley understood what that could mean. As it turns out--if we can do it like the GGRD, it's going to be awesome. During the scrimmage part of practice, each team and their captain went into a huddle of sorts. We worked out who was playing what for the next jam. After each jam the captain told her girls what she saw they could improve on and what she saw they did well. Having this kind of feedback made a world of difference.

Forth. They have positions. I had just spent a long time on the phone with Ivanna Spankin from Sin City, learning about tactics and positions, how to run a line-up, how to handle a bench. It was awesome. All I needed was to see it in action. And that was exactly what I got from GGRD. I skated with the Brooklyn Bombshells for the evening. Aside from being a total unmitigated liability as the #4 skater... I think I did ok.Har.

Positions change everything. All of a sudden, instead of just skating around in a pack--you've got a specific job to do... you've got to stay on the inside (for example), stay with your pivot, and work together in very specific ways-- to accomplish much more specific goals. I know that sounds vague. I will post more on strategy as I learn it. But the basics are there are four positions in the pack assigned by numbers 1-4, with 1 being homologous with the pivot position.