Not YET!

What's the Deal?
Seriously, am I a derby girl yet or what? No! I am not. Not a fully functioning WFTDA-tested-and-passed one anyway. I am still Freshmeat technically I suppose, though at this point I feel more like I'm in some sort of derby purgatory.

The Freshmeat programme is all but done. We no longer have training once a week as all but a handful of us have written the test whether it led to passing or failing. If the girls passed they are now ostensibly on the D-VAS, the current farm team at TORD, and can go to league practices with them. If the girls didn't pass the test then they are now done until the next Freshmeat programme where they can try again to gain their WFTDA testing expertise and hopefully pass the test next time around.

There are however a handful of us who missed a whole module (a session made up of two weeks of training sessions). We were allotted a maximum of three misses for the whole programme but we were not allowed to have a whole module missed. When I had my car crashum-smashum I missed two weeks of derby, and, unfortunately it was a whole module that I missed in doing that, not one piece of two different modules as I had thought at the time.

When this was pointed out to me I was tres unhappy, until Lady Gag-Ya said that they would be doing a bootcamp for the handful of us that had this situation. Yay! This is an excellent thing, this means that I will still have a chance to write the test. That is very good. But right now, due to TORD changing venues, there is confusion as to when this bootcamp will actually occur.

So, now I skate in purgatory, waiting for my time to prove my skating prowess, or lack thereof. It is more difficult of course now to practice my derby skating. I can practice skating of course outdoors now, when it's nice and better still go to the skate rinks. But I don't really have anyone to practice hits with or things of that nature.

Well, I didn't that is. I may now in fact have some options for getting hit. Cause, we all want to get hit dontcha know! These new possibilities come about from making new friends and finding out new derby stuff in my NSOing for 2 Fast 2 Furious, the tournament which took place last weekend for farm teams/new derby girls.

2 Fast 2 Furious
This was a super fun derby experience for me for multiple reasons. First, before even getting there I was excited because it was a derby thing where I knew practically no one and I was getting to try out a new NSO position, jam timing. I love doing new things.

Another reason for excitement was I would get to hang out with my friend April Cruel, who skates with GTA Rollergirls, who were putting on the tournament. I hadn't actually even thought of this possibility when signing up but was delighted that I got to spend the day hanging with a good high-school friend.

Here is the main arena at the start; warm-ups and organising.

All of the other reasons were the lots of fun stuff that happened to me and fun people I met AND finding out about the South Simcoe Rebel Rollers open skate night on Monday's at Orillia's Rolling Skate Place. This is AWESOME. Well, I hope it's actually awesome but I'm sure it is. I haven't yet attended said open skate practice, but I will be this Monday. I am SUPER stoked to be able to skate and have someone yell at me to get my ass down and hit better. I want to pass my test!!!

Of course, another reason I had been excited about for the tournament was that I was getting to see my girls skate. That is, girls who had gone through Freshmeat with me. I had of course held hopes of skating in 2 Fast 2 Furious, [check out that link, by the Derby Nerd, he is so great, great review!] but it was not to be. Still, it was super neat to see my girls playing for real. It made it seem so much more real. *sighs* My time will come. Also, they were so cool. They did so well, you couldn't tell it was their first game ever.

Also at 2 Fast I was gifted my first whistle. I needed help learning how to blow. Le sigh. It is so sad that that is actually true.

There was a bit of disorganization when I first arrived on the scene at 2 Fast 2 Furious at Ted Reeves Arena. Not total chaos or anything, just some minor chickens-running-with-heads-cut-off. It was no surprise, GTAR isn't a huge organisation, and it's not-for-profit, volunteer run of course. There were eighteen farm teams there to play and two buildings were going with games occurring simultaneously with at least eight NSOs needed for each game at any given time and of course the refs. I'm trying to think what is the least amount of refs a game can have and I think it may be five, though I'm not sure. I should look that shit up I should probably know that. [Somebody should tell me... hint... hint..]

So in any case, I wasn't wearing white like I should have been, but nobody had told me that I should do that. Not surprising since I had had to write to the volunteer wrangler and ask where and when I was supposed to be at the tournament. But, tra-la-la, everyone is doing their best I have no doubt. It's all volunteer time so we all can understand the difficulties.

Here is a game taking place in the bubble which has been stopped, with all of us going down, for a girl who is hurt on the track. It was one of the players for Violet Uprising from Guelph, she hurt her ankle badly unfortunately. 

When I went to do my duties they asked me if I had brought a whistle and a timer. Gah! I hadn't. I didn't know I should have. No, I am assured, I was not meant to, they had just been hoping because one of their whistles had run-oft so I was without whistle.

This was not good. I'm not great at whistling. I sort of looked around helpless and befuddled while they did some more chicken-with-heads-cut-off running around. What to do, what to do. Then, suddenly, up skates a lot of leg; Bratty Cardia. She was one of the referees working the first game and had been warming up ( I am familiar with her from TORD but don't know her very well yet). She says, "You need a whistle? I'll get you a whistle." And off she skates, presumably to obtain said whistle.

It was interesting that while she was gone on her mission of whistledom a number of other NSOs around me began talking about their whistles and how they had acquired their first whistles. In fact they all had little stories about someone giving them their first whistle. And now, I have mine.

So, here begins (continues really) derby lore. Like a Buddah statue, one is best given their first NSO derby whistle, I imagine so that they might glean all of the knowledge of the one who gifted it. Sounds good to me, Bratty is like a rules dictionary. Also, I love my whistle, it has plastic around the mouthy part which in practical use at said tournie was waaay better then the ones without. Yay me. Thank you Bratty.

Here are the winning teams (r-l), Coal Miners Daughters first, D-VAS second,  Queen City Brawlers third.