HITS HITS HITS!

Second 2-hour practice today. General Anarchy (aka, The Whip) was in a fairly good mood, sprawls were limitied to only 6, and whistle drills weren't overly soul-crushing this week. Best of all, HIT DRILLS. She (Anarchy) paired us off in lines on the inside and outside of the track, designated which side was dealing the hit, and sent us on our merry way. A couple things quickly became apparent. First off, despite his waifish 180lb physique, Speed Bump can hit plenty hard, regularly flooring his opponents or at least sending them out of bounds. Second, staying in an actual low derby stance is vital, it is the difference between getting knocked over and being inconvenienced when someone plows into you. Demon regularly street-sweepered anyone unfortunate enough to be paired against him with relative ease, though Speed Bump did manage to put him down a couple times when he landed a strong hit on his terms. I got to be a trauma sponge, falling about as often as not when presented with a decent hit, and tried to deal out some hits of my own in the process. Unfortunately, I still think my hits are about as threatening as a pack of wild pugs, but that will improve with time. I really gotta focus on blasting through my target and commiting to the hit when I make my cut.

After hit drills we did some jammer drills where one lucky individuals had the task of getting through 5 blockers unaided. A couple of the faster/better players actually pulled it off a couple times, but Anarchy expressed her surprise at our mediocre competency... but not before making us do push-ups for letting a single jammer through the first time. Everyone got a turn at being the victim/jammer, no exceptions. When my turn to suck floor finally rolled around I was surprised to find that I could actually make a decent stab at things, nearly getting through on one of my better tries. Of course, this only leads me to worry at how well a 'good' jammer will ninja their way through the pack, especially when he has 4 friends wrecking shop to help him through.

After a few rounds of squish the jammer, Anarchy upped the ante and gave the jammer penny to Speed Bump and also gave him a friend to help him get through. The blocker from his team had the job of getting into the pack and just blazing holes in their lines or causing havoc to let Speed through. Turns out that adding just one blocker makes a noticable difference, but by then we had made decent headway in working together, so it wasn't a complete slaughter.

Practice ended with some of the team going to skate the Springwater trail. Since my legs had long since turned to mush by then and my left skate was trying to forcefully divide like a single celled organism, I was not amongst them. Gonna be sore tomorrow, but I am happy as a clam with the team progress.

Goal for the next two weeks (no practice next weekend):Skate lower, apparently I need to be dragging my sack to avoid being yelled at...