Yesterday some of The Skateful Dead team travelled over to Sporting Edge community sports centre near Manchester. Some of us were there for the beginner training, including me, others to scrimmage.
There was a lesson running when we got there, it looked like skaters attempting their “25 in 5”. There were probably around 30 in our session – I was a little nervous.
The session was supervised by Sausage Roller and he and the others (Pinky Fingaz I recall was amongst them) made the session very enjoyable.
Most of the session covered walls; how they should work, roles of the blockers and recycling. There were two games though that I felt worked really well because of the number of skaters.
The first game was one which involved falling and avoiding the fallen. To understand this it’s useful to be aware that before skaters can take part in a bout they have to achieve a set of minimum skills. Amongst these is the ability to fall and make yourself small and the ability to avoid fallen skaters.
In this game the leader called out the number of people you had to touch. This had the effect of bunching up the skaters. Then the insructors would bump people randomly. On this signal the skater had to hit the deck with a four point fall (AKA pornstar) and make themselves small. With the skaters bunched up there was then plenty of opportunity to practice avoiding those that had fallen.
The second game towards the end of the session was “Monster of the Track”. Everyone started by skating around, including instructors. Phase one of the game was to make the instructors fall or push them off the track. Phase two involved the learners turning on each other to do the same. Last person standing becoming Monster of the Track. I don’t recall who that was, though the last instructor standing was #0 – sorry, don’t recall her name, but a damn good skater.
Also in the session was 5 minutes of skating backwards. That really does work your legs. I also found that I got out of breath a little chasing round in Monster of the Track. Obviously need to step up the aerobic exercise regime!
I big thank you to Manchester Roller Derby for making us so welcome – I forgot about feeling nervous almost straight away :-)