The Jammers Bible

We are attending roller derby ‘boot camp’ this evening and I am sooo excited to get the opinion of some bad ass women about my skating ability. Ok, let’s face it I am sooo excited anytime we’re going skating. I’m a fanatic. The new league is doing great. We’ve started to set our season and our first bout will be in January. It’ll be an away bout (sorry Mom) and then my lovely friends and family can come see us play a home bout in Feb. more details later, I’ll send out a save the date to everyone soon. We are up to roughly 30 women and still growing. We have one gal who nearly broke her elbow at her first practice falling at White Pines (marble floor) but she still keeps coming back, I already love her and I barely know her. Boom Boom Martini pointed out at the last board meeting we haven’t had a month go by yet without new skaters and that’s the best kind of news.

We also have a couple of new coaches. Dan Diamond who has a way of yelling that makes you motivated but not mad and Dangerous Dave who jammed banked track roller derby back in the day and has all kinds of interesting things to tell us. I literally write down all the advice he’s giving and started making one a sort of scrapbook called “the Jammer’s Bible”. Eventually I imagine it’ll get passed form jammer to jammer with all sorts of scraps of paper and scribbles sticking out of it (think of the Devine Secrets Ya-Ya Sisterhood or the Sex Bible from American Pie). Of course you have to be a good jammer before anyone will take your advice, so let me just say that Dangerous Dave can skate faster than me while going backwards to my going forwards and I am fast.

Speaking of - I’m working terribly hard on spinning mid track and skating backwards. I want to be great at it before we hit Roller Con next year. I want to be able to block backwards and execute the most awesome backwards whip in the world - the one Annsanity learned in Vegas. But first I need to stop being knocked kneed while just skating backwards. I fell a few months back at White Pines (again marble floor) and bruised my tailbone pretty good and since then have been all nerves when skating backwards. I’m getting over it by just doing it.

Dangerous Dave Jammer - September 2007