Last night I made it over to Midweek Masterclass, an informal practice session that is organised by Leeds Roller Dolls.
It takes place at the Futsal Stadium in Cottingley near Leeds. At practice we’d been told that the surface at Futsal stadia is odd and that we should get some experience of it. The European Championships in July are taking place at the Futsal stadium in Birmingham.
The surface is made up of what seem to be plastic tiles perhaps 25cm square. I started off a little gingerly. As you roll across the surface you feel the tile joins and they make a very plasticy sound. I imagined it to be the real world equivalent of skating on Lego, except that the surface was smooth and grippy. I gradually built up speed around the track, expecting to slide out on the curves, but I didn’t.
I’d seen from Facebook that Dempsey Hammer was over from Belfast Roller Derby. She was looking for somewhere to skate and would be there. We had a chat during warm up. She was very kind about my transitions, which in truth are okay on my good side and a bit shonky on my bad.
Then Andy got Tony and me practising side steps. My “not enough knee bend” bad habit didn’t help. We did that for a bit, but quite frankly it’s not very interesting. The aim of side stepping is to keep your back to the jammer and to keep the wall tight and level. It needs to be done at speed. I found my skates wanted to escape forwards/backwards. Something to practice little and often I feel.
After more whizzing around, mixed in with occasional attempts at various minimum skills, I got chatting to Andy again. He found out that I had my skate cones with me and that was that. He set up a slalom down one side of the arena with a jump at the end. More cones formed another slalom so he could show off his grapevine/barrel roll skills. The slalom/jump was great. I can strike “jump over a 6 inch tall object” from my mins.
Then Dempsey, Andy, Tony and I set up “10 cones spaced no more than 150cm apart” around the track and slalomed through those “in under 6 seconds”. Strike another min off the list.
We finished with a little 3 wall/jammer practice – yeah, I fell on my arse – but no practice session would be complete without that.
Thanks to Tone Death for the lift there and back, Andy Slam C Nesbitt for the training and Dempsey for jamming with us :-)