Skate Beckett #319 @skatebeckett - Tumblr Blog

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#Rollerderby WFTDA Cincinnatirollergirls cincinnati macrum saccityrollers motherfuckergotfuckedup shegotintheway

an invisible power shift in WFTDA derby officiating

Is your league struggling to find refs and NSOs for games? Does it seem like all the experienced ones are “busy that weekend”? It’s been building for a while, but this season we seem dramatically closer to “peak derby schedule” than last year. Between A, B, rec, juniors, men’s, tournaments, etc there are more games being played every weekend than ever before. But there aren’t more experienced refs and NSOs to work those games. I’m not going to get into why the number of officials hasn’t increased, not yet at least. What I want to talk about are the choices this allows officials to make. Good officials now have 2 or 3 or 5 games to choose from within their travel distance almost every weekend. To begin understanding which ones they will decide to work, you have to understand why officials officiate.

Just like improving their ranking is more important to most teams than an individual win or loss, the goal of most officials isn’t just doing a good job at their position in your game. It is improving their resume. A better resume gets them staffed in higher level games and tournaments and both of those give them the opportunity to improve their skills, to be the best they can be.

Of course that’s not the only factor in play here. There’s also certs and evals to think about, but that process is so broken it’s going to have to wait for another time. I can’t sum it up better than what an NSO told me the other day when talking about which game she was going to do next: “(League A) is a 3 hour drive away. They give a good travel stipend, feed us well, are genuinely appreciative that we volunteer our time to make their games happen, their HNSO puts together tournament-level NSO crews for almost every game. She demands competence, but is easy to work with. Working their games improves my skills and looks good on my resume. They do all the paperwork, correctly. There are very few game delays due to NSO issues, and when they do have them they’re resolved quickly.” “(League B) is a 10 minute drive away. They act like we should be thanking them for the opportunity to work their games. They struggle to get bodies in all the NSO positions, much less people who know what they’re doing. Its fresh meat and derby widows who don’t care about doing the job beyond the bare minimum. There are always multiple time outs for fixing problems with the score board, penalty tracking, etc. Their HNSO doesn’t know how to do half the paperwork. All sorts of issues are missed, some of which impact game play. I end up a worse NSO after working their games because of the chaos and disorganization. It’s a waste of my time.” Guess which one she’ll be working for this weekend? Which gets us back to my initial point…Leagues haven’t figured out that the officiating environment they’ve cultivated is now, more than ever, determining the quality of officials they get because competent officials have a ton of options for which games they choose to work. All the posts you see about “being more polite” to officials aren’t addressing 10% of the issue. And until more people realize that, at the league level and at the level of how rules and procedures are structured (also a subject for another post), nothing is going to get better.

southerneclair

Roller derby isn’t about skating. That is its primary medium, but it’s actually about other things. Learning not to be scared. Trusting yourself. Getting over your lifetime of hang ups. Learning that the worst things that can happen to you–violence, falling, getting hurt–are things you can handle so that, outside of the controlled spaces where you expect these things to happen, you become less afraid of the uncontrolled. You learn to protect yourself. You learn to recognize bad people, bad places, bad situations, and learn how to go around them, through them, beyond them.

As a team, derby girls fight not with each other, but with what is holding each back. I can look at Killer K and know what she is fighting inside by what she can’t do yet on her skates. She’s scared of falling a certain way. And so I push her to fall: it’s the only way to get her past her own fear, to give her power over it.

I am afraid of falling to my death, so my derby coach told me to climb up a wall anyway, and then fall. I would catch myself.

Derby isn’t about skating. It’s about being your own savior.

lordwanjavi

6 Things We Can All Learn From Superheroes > Julia Lepetit and Tristan Cooper

sizvideos

Simply Delicious Shower Thoughts with Cookie Monster

Video - Via Siz iOS app

cosmic-noir

Why did you do this to me?

babygrotesque-deactivated201809

This is fucking great

hansmoleskine-deactivated201810

found in a men’s washroom at Western University in London, Ontario

tearobite

Anyone coming to the Nashville scrimmageathon this weekend?

I will be skating 3 and coaching 3, then skating in the first game of the night. Come say hi!

skatebeckett

threatavansufferin, ragdollruby, and I are all going to be there! I'm NSOing 5 (I think)

threatavansufferin

Apparently to rent warehouse space big enough for a track will cost you your first born and a contract signed in blood

skatebeckett

Yup! We got lucky with our space; we were the first tenants, and the brewery needed some money (prior to opening). And now, they dont' need the money, and no-one else would want the space. It still costs us an arm and a leg (even with a huge sponsorship package and 3 subleases). We bumped our dues up when we moved in based on the fact that we were spending at least the difference in gas when we drove a half hour to practice.

cracked

pocassium

FORESHADOWING

lightspun

Uterus, I do not understand your need to have a baby. We cannot afford a baby. I do not want a baby. Hell you wouldn’t even be happy if we had a baby. I find these temper tantrums you throw every month we don’t have a baby absolutely unacceptable.

sodamnrelatable

today my best friend asked me “why cinderella’s shoe fell off if it fit her perfectly”

skatebeckett

Totally had this discussion last night! We have a couple theories.

Into The Woods posits that the prince put pitch on the stairs, but that only works if he knows she's going to run. BUT there could have been something sticky she stepped in, just not intentionally placed there.

She could have left it for him, but how did she know the shoes wouldn't change back at midnight (and why didn't they? [Methinks the pair had to be together])?

We decided that her feet were sweaty. Lots of dancing in fancy shoes (regardless of what they're made of)? Definitely causation for sweaty feet. And maybe she had a problem with sweatiness....

I'm struggling. How do people become more positive? I hate my job. I have very few friends, and many/most of them are rarely available. I'm too old to be living with my mother (who has too much influence over my life). I don't feel like I'm progressing in derby as quickly as I'd like/ should. I get that attitude has a huge role to play in all this. But I am at a loss as to how to be more upbeat when I feel like a failure.

mxlabradorite

18 in 5

Adult onset asthma, kids. I don’t recommend it.

skatebeckett

Mine's exercise induced. The cold and dust definitely don't help. But neither does the heat. My laps Wednesday were 17/5. :(

logantmiller

Found my new dentist.

wander-meets-world-blog

Oh my god

threatavansufferin

I just signed up for this this weekend and I’m totally jazzed about it. A chance to dress up and play roller derby with a buncha cool people I know only from the interwebs right now. Anyone else going?

eeniemeanieskates

Oh my god! Thank you for posting this. I need to go con some teammates into going with me now.

skatebeckett

I'm totally going to be there NSOing all day!(@RagdollRuby is skating) It did have a skater limit of 60, but we were able to register yesterday, so I think there are still spots.