I haven’t blogged in awhile, we’ve been busy, and I really haven’t had much to say. I don’t really have much to say now, but I feel inclined to vomit a little.
Ok, I’m tired, really tired. Here it is a week and a half away from the last bout of the season, a long season. I realized today that after the 24th, I will have skated in 12 bouts for Santa Cruz, whew! It has been a rollercoaster of emotion, mental deterioration and physicality. Even though this is my second season, I really feel it has been my first. This season I focused more on strategy, the rules, and learning everything, and I mean everything, I could about rollerderby. I watched every single one of our games, at least twice, watched all four weekends of regionals, and tried to get to any outside scrimmages I could. I overcommitted to everything at rollercon, taking 8 classes and skating in 7 challenge bouts. On top of derby saturation, I sit on our Board of Directors, am on the Coaching Committee and am Captain of our All Star team. Again, I say whew. This is all on top of working 40 hours a week, getting engaged this year, planning a wedding and becoming a stepmom. Yep, I am tired. The messed up thing about this is that, most the girls on our league are just as committed if not more, some of them work 2-3 jobs and go to school. Come Oct 26th, I am officially in the off season. It really couldn’t come any quicker.
I think as a league, we’re all tired. We went through a lot of change at the beginning of the season, which I feel put a strain on the All Star team and our connection with each other. Damn we are some opinionated ladies. I think after a few months we finally started to get our connection back, it started out slowly with the Jet City game, and every game after that we left the track more and more stoked on how well we are playing as a team. I am so ready for this game. I can’t wait to hit the track with my team kill it.
We are playing short this game, not the normal 14 person roster. We’ve had some injuries and retirements at the end of the season. Raven is out with a blown ACL, Kiki broke her ankle, Rowdy’s got some knee issues and Kicken retired at the beginning of the month.
This is the season where we’ve done it all and learned it all. We had our first travel game where we had to fly, we learned we need a deeper bench to accommodate injuries, and we’ve learned that we need to pull these B team players up faster.
I’ve learned a lot about myself too. I need to be more positive, more encouraging, I need to say what I mean without being mean when I say it, I need to support my team no matter what. It’s not my responsibility to yell or scream at them, and its not very nice. I learned that its not as important to win as it is to have teamwork and feel accomplished on and off the track.
Going into this next game, I hope to remember everything I learned and apply it. I hope to have time in the off season to work on my goals for next year. I wanna come out next season on fire and twice as good as I am now.
