When the team first started there was a group of guys that were coaching. Due to several conflicts (I’ve heard so many different snippets from everyone but in all honestly don’t know very much about it), the male coaches were asked to leave. The fresh meat coach was not part of the problem so he stayed, but the other guys did not stick around. I know that they discussed if one or two guys would be willing to stick around, but it was an all or nothing situation with them. I vaguely talked about it several months ago back when I was fresh meat.
Well anyway, we needed an occasional practice coach (when normal coaches couldn’t be there) and one of the guys offered to coach us on those nights. He’s an amazing skater and derby player with the Magic City Misfits and brought some really great drills to practice.
We started out by making two 4x4 squares on the floor with some tape. It was kinda funny because we had no idea why we were making the squares (and to be honest, they were some wonky squares because I am bad at shapes). Once we did, J told us what we would be doing. It was like sumo wrestling in that two girls would be in the square and could only use legal hits and pushes to get the other girl to either fall down or go out of the square. Once she lost on that square, she’d move on to the next square. So basically there would be two “matches” going on at any one time. It was so much fun and I hope we do it again in the future!
After that we did a last man standing type of thing, but rather than the typical spread out way, it was closer with a ref at each end about 15 feet away from the pack. There were two hitters that would go around and try to hit you out or down, and if you went behind or in front of the ref you were out as well. The first two rounds were fun and then the third kind sucked a little because I was one of the hitters and I just failed so bad. Ugh.
The next thing we did was a Push & Pull Pyramid. With a partner you start out pushing them for one lap then they push you for one lap. You go to two then they go to two, and so on until you’ve done five laps. After five you start pulling them rather than pushing and work your way down until you each end with one lap. The one thing I didn’t like about this drill was that it was not fair for me or my partner. We needed to find a partner that was similar in size so it would be fair, but everyone else had already paired up and I ended up with a much skinnier girl. She’s one of our fresh meat that was a great skater already, so I got to push and pull a very light girl and she had to push and pull heavy me, but it wasn’t too bad because she’s already a strong skater (although in the pulling drill I cheated a little and sticky skated so she wouldn’t have to work as hard).
The next drill we did (yes, we did a lot of new drills; fun new drills are always awesome) was a competition between two girls. The two girls would start out about 15 feet behind the rest of the skaters who were in a pack. When the ref blew the whistle the entire pack would go on a knee and just stay there. It was up to the two girls to race through the downed skaters without touching anyone and do a lap around the track. Whoever made it to the back of the pack first was the winner. I lost my first one (because I was literally stuck right behind the other girl going around the track so I didn’t lose by much), and I won my second one.
We did several other things including building and holding walls, scrimmaging, and some very in depth scrimmage strategy but I think I’ve gone on a bit long already. I left practice feeling really pissed off at a few people and it sort of spoiled my good practice happiness, but typing this up has made me feel a lot better about how fun of a time I had!
No comments:
Post a Comment