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| Carl and Razor giving us our instructions and positions |
But all in all, I feel pretty great :)
We scrimmaged SVRG's Hard Drivers last night (although, truth be told, it wasn't JUST the Hard Drivers, but also a few of their A-level and B-level skaters as well) in our first team-on-team scrimmage. And though we did not emerge victorious, there were lots of tiny triumphs to be had.
A team-on-team scrimmage is just about as close to a simulated game as you can get. As you can tell by the name, it's one team against another, as opposed to a mixed scrimmage (which a lot of us have been skating in) where teams come together and mix up all their skaters and divide them into random teams. It also means that we played a full-length game - two 30-minute periods - which I don't think any of us have done so far either (the mixed scrimmages are usually only 30 minutes, or at most, two 20-minute periods), so this was a major test of endurance for us. I've skated three mixed scrimmages so far, and this one definitely felt different.
Oh, and by the way, this is SVRG. They are the league I started with, whom I originally wanted to join, and I'm not the only one - a large number of us also started with SVRG's bootcamp, and that's how we met each other in the first place. There might not have been a PRG without SVRG!
So it was a big deal to be skating them last night! A lot of the girls on the Hard Drivers were in bootcamp with me at some point or another. They fared better than I did and moved forward, while I took a more circuitous route, but this is the first time that we are all competing together, and for me that's huge. Like, I've finally made it to where you are! I'm still not as skilled as you are, but now we're at least in the same ball park. That means a lot to me, that I've finally "caught up."
I'm very proud of PRG for last night, because SVRG was killing badly with every jam, but that was never point. We fought to stand our ground. We made improvements as night went on, looking at our weaknesses from the first half and trying to remedy them as best we could in the second. Even down to the last jam, the final four whistles of the last jam, we still gave it our all.
And I PIVOTED. Dude, I've never pivoted before. I've never given much thought to pivoting, as I've always thought I would be best at position #3 in the pack. But it worked out. A big part of pivoting is knowing what's going on in the pack at all times and to control the speed of the pack and communicate, and that's what I focused on. I'm still not as knowledgeable about strategy as I could be, but I take to heart the stuff that Carl tells us about what to do in certain situations (especially if it has been further enforced by my experiences in scrimmages), and as a pivot, that's what I tried to stick to. I got lots of encouraging comments from skaters of both leagues about my performance as a pivot, so I definitely feel good about it. I did always say that I wanted to learn all positions! (though, I'm nowhere near wanting to be a jammer right now.)
[Insert obligatory dirty roller derby joke about wearing (helmet) panties here.]
So all in all, a great night. I think the final score was 300-something SVRG to PRG's 10 (ha!!!), but th emost important thing is that we had a lot of fun and we learned a LOT. I'm sure that we will be talking about this tonight at practice.