Shitty City Rollers bootcamp (and the art of hearing your bench)

Wow what a weekend. As many of you have been able to read on Facebook, I have finally played my first game again since I got major back surgery almost exactly a year ago. It was a huge emotional experience. I cried during the third jam, during half time I full on sobbed and I shed some more tears during the final jam of the scrimmage. I had finally done it!

I have fought hard to be able to come back. To prove my surgeon wrong. To be able to play the game I had come to love so completely. It has been an emotional roller coaster with both peaks and periods of deep sorrow. But that's a different story than what I want to write about now and I'm not done yet.

Since my surgery I have benched for my own team (amazing journey in tactical improvement), Royals (very exciting to coach a team I didn't know) and now last weekend I benched for Oulu in their scrimmage against Umeå Radical Rollers. By now I had quite some experience benching, but I was still very nervous. I mean.. who the hell am I to tell Kata Strofi to call it, right? Yes I was star struck. Very much so.

It was an amazing experience. The team consisted of very green rookies, higher level intermediates and Finnish national team players. Different levels of experience require different things from the bench coach and it was awesome to try and manage that. I was snapping people out of being lost, making people feel good about what they did right, trying to extinguish anger at themselves for doing something wrong, calming down overly excited players and getting derby-gasms from the communication I had with Kata while she was on the track. Wow!

Easy hand signals and mouthing some words, a small nod back and forward and all was understood and would be executed. Where the rookies wanted me to yell louder, Kata seemed to hear me even when I whispered.

It really proved to me again that hearing the bench is a skill. It's a skill that you have to train. When doing scrimmages on your practices, have someone bench you. Try out different systems, different hand signals and different atmospheres at the bench and find out what works for you and your team. And then practice with it. Make it the main point of certain drills to watch and listen to the bench. An important part in this is getting the rest of the team to stay calm. Don't let them create any disturbance in your communication no matter how well meant or passionate it is. They should focus on their inner zen or on the tactics for the next line up.

Thank you again Shitty City for a lovely weekend. You have no idea how much it has given me. <3

Me on the left together with Tiny Tourettes, Monster Midge and Hellsparx blocking Kata.
(Photograph stolen here (see video on same page))