Stranger in a strange land

Tonight I attended a practice with Appleton, Wisconsin's Paper Valley Roller Girls. Before practice I went to an open skate at Skater's Edge. It was substantially less busy than Roller Kingdom typically is. They have a nice, polished wood floor and I envied the fact that their derby track is permanent - tape that has been lacquered over!


PVRG is a WFTDA-AL which practices three times a week for two hours each. The league is comprised of A-Level and B-Level travel teams. They do most of their stretching while skating, versus NHRD which does most of its stretching in the middle. They have a head coach and, tonight, had another coach/manager off skates.

It was a small crew of about 12 skaters and two refs (the league has about 35 active skaters) so they had loads of space on the track for drills. Some of the drills that I remember include:

• Paceline weaving drill but the person in front drops back and weaves their way backward through the pack.
• Plow stop partner drill where the "blocker" was to literally sit on the jammer and come to a full plow stop
• Line hopping drill where they skated on the outside line of the track, hopping from foot to foot
• Jumping drill where objects of different heights were placed around the track and skaters jumped the biggest one the felt comfortable with
• "Awareness" drill where league packs up and the coach skates behind them holding up X number of fingers. The whole league has to look and call out how many fingers. Coach holds his hand in a different place each time.
• Group drill with four members. Two defensive blockers, one offensive blocker and a jammer. Defensive blockers go first and offensive blocker and jammer follow. Version #1 - OB sweeps DB to the outside to allow J to get through. Version #2 - same deal but DB get swept to the outside.
• Relay Race. Four groups, one in each corner. Each team member skates two laps and then hands off to the next skater.

They only scrimmage one night a week and they don't do stats for their scrimmages because I don't think they have enough leftover people. Everyone was very nice and friendly. They are expected to graduate from the apprentice program in June, just like us (SO EXCITING!) 
 
In other news, they had really good prices on wheels and bearings at the skate shop so I picked up a set of Radar Pures and Bones Redz for outdoor wheels. Also, the article that I wrote for the Greater NH Sports paper finally got published! It's cool to see my name and work in print! 

Potentially practicing with the Fox Cityz Foxz tomorrow night, then back to PVRG on Tuesday with an adult open skate on Wednesday night. Busy bee!