Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Building Blocks

Last night we had team practice with the Pink Pistols and Camero Harem. Remember, these are the ladies who eat glass for breakfast. After warming up and during stretching one of the Harem cheerfully mentioned that it had been a while since they had done 50 laps on the outside of the derby ring in 10 minutes in a pack. Obviously time to get on that, right?
The point of the exercise is not just endurance but also working as a group. Some skaters will be slower and it's up to the faster skaters to either give them the inside line or actually take turns pushing. We managed to do it in 10:30.
My two favorite drills of the evening were with the Pistols. In the first, everyone had a buddy. It was the first persons goal to always stay with the second, and it was the second persons goal to get away from the first. We had to do this in a pack. It's actually a lot of fun to chase someone around when there are 10 other people skating erratically in your same general vicinity.
The other drill I really liked was similar in nature. We had two groups of two. One group of two had to stay hip to hip and the other group of two had to try and break them up. I like these drills because they take just one aspect of scrimmaging and really hammer it home. Bit by bit they start to become instinct and lately I've been finding myself sort of knowing what to do in a jam. Weird huh?
<originally posted on 2.15.12>

No comments:

Post a Comment