Full frontal blocking

Wow! What skills we're seeing during the still ongoing Roller Derby World Cup in Toronto. As a beginning team (yes, we rock! But we are very much beginners) it's impossible to look at a team like Australia and say: "in two months time I want us to skate like they do." But what I CAN try to do as a trainer is to pick out two aspects of a high ranking team's gameplay and try and improve on those two aspects. The two I picked were endurance and being able to play derby facing backwards.

Derby endurance is a tough kind of endurance. You are basically skating two periods of 30 minutes filled with long intervals at 100%. In the world of training, an interval at 95% is about 10-15 seconds. Any longer and you have to come down in intensity. A jam can take anything up to 2 minutes. Yikes! Yeah. But since it can also be as short 15 seconds (doesn't happen often, but it happens), as soon as that double jammer signal comes you have to explode into a 100% sprint AND worry about getting passed 8 players of which 4 are trying as hard as they can not to let you pass. If you're unlucky enough that neither jammer is getting lead jammer (= the ability to call of the jam) you're gonna be skating at a neck breaking pace for 2 minutes. There's much more to jammer endurance, but I wont bore you with that right now.

Soo... skating backwards and playing derby. That still covers a wide range of skills of which I picked two that I feel are important. This was one:

Turning around and supporting your wall from the front both with your body and with your eyes. A while back we started actively training on letting the jammer push forward on a strong wall so that the wall gets out of play and has to let her pass. Of course the wall has to try and break, but breaking is much easier when going backwards. In comes the backwards rolling wall support. The wall support is now the one with the most perfect view over all the pack action and should therefore communicate everything she sees.

Manic Medic as wall support, Hellsparx and Evil Fairy as wall and Miss Maniac as jammer (here the jammer has almost broken through the wall already but the wall support manages to hold her back a bit longer).