My first week as a derby girl
This week I attended my first Denver Roller Doll practices. Once you’ve been accepted to the league, you have to go through a four week training program called “Welcome to the Dollhouse”. For four consecutive Thursdays, we learn the basic skills we need for roller derby.
We “babydolls” were eligible to start practicing with the team on Feb 1, so many of us came out to our first practice on Monday, before our Dollhouse program started. I had ordered skates but they hadn’t yet arrived, so I was wearing some old ‘brownies’ with absolutely no support. I enjoyed just practicing skating and some of the basic drills they had us perform (weaves), but my feet were a mess afterwards!
Happily, my skates had arrived before Thursday rolled around (haha), and it was like magic! On Monday we’d learned proper skating position and some basic moves for good strides, and once I had my new skates with the pretty pink speed wheels on, it all fell into place! I felt very comfortable flying around the track (ok, maybe not quite flying..). Because this was the official first start to our derby careers, the pace of practice was actually slower than on Monday, as we stopped to have different skills demonstrated to us.
The first week of practice focused on falling. No, not because you’re going to do it anyway, but because when you’re skating at high speeds in a pack, you need to learn how to ‘fall small’, and fall safe. We practiced falling on one knee, both knees, all fours (“don’t forget to turn your head so your face doesn’t smash into the ground!”) and some sort of weird softball-type slide (“don’t sit on your skate – it’ll HURT!”). Obviously it seems awkward at first to “make” yourself fall, but all the padding helped us all to realize that this was nothing to be worried about. Our last activity was a relay race that involved skating out and back to different points, falling a certain way, getting up and skating back. I don’t know that we learned “good” falling style, but we certainly got the hang of getting up quickly and getting going again! Once we finished, the girl leading training actually told us that’s generally something they do in the second week – so we’d be doing it again next Thursday!
There were 29 of us invited to join the league after our tryouts, and I believe most of us were there on Thursday. I was glad I had been there on Monday to allay the nervousness some of the other girls were showing at our first Dollhouse session. But one thing I’ve seen so far is that despite the rough look of the Dolls, everyone I’ve met has been very nice and accomodating. Certainly there is some aggression there (“if after a few weeks you’re still apologizing every time someone falls down, you’re in the wrong sport”), but they’re not there to make us feel small or insignificant. It really is a culture, with plenty of other events and activities going on (evidently there is a St. Patty’s Day float?) This is exactly what I need here in Colorado – a chance to try something new, meet new people, and get involved!
