Check out B Team’s Coach Fouloutboy’s piece on his time with the team coming up to this weekend’s Tournament!
You can check out the B Team this weekend in Shoreline battling it out against Limerick Roller Derby and Roller Derby Porto.
28th October – Dublin, Ireland
October makes it a year of me benching the B Team as a solo act. It was October last year that we played Paris in Dublin, then Dundee away, and this weekend is exactly a year since the B Team, myself, and a small but very self-assured French lady, went to Birmingham to take part in CCR’s awesome “Attack of the B teams” tournament. We had started that month knowing we had agreed to a lot of games (we referred to it as HELLTOBER) and we were looking to just improve, predicted scores or rankings taking a back seat to just wanting to get better as a team, on track and on the bench. Besides this tournament had some serious outfits going too – CCR, Rainy City, Tiger Bay, LRG C, the London Rockin’ Rollers and us! Winless in 5 games, a very inexperienced Bench Coach and a transfer skater the team had just met a week before as line-up. What was the worst that could happen??
Everything I knew about derby I learned from just following DRD’s B team around as a fan and a partner of a skater who’d been on the B Team for the previous 3 years or so. Away games in Europe in places I would never have visited with some awesome people had shown me what kind of environment derby was. Granted I was usually drinking in the stands and my grasp of the rules would be best described as “loose” but having played a lot of sports elsewhere and having witnessed first-hand through my fiancée and her teammates, the effort, training hours and work they put in, both on and off track I had huge respect for them. Once I joined on as a Co-Bench in March I learned SO much about derby from watching them train every week and as I got to know them as humans I knew how good they were and how good they could be if they just believed in themselves a little more. So last October after we were beaten by Paris at home and having been beaten by Dundee a week after, we flew over to Birmingham late on a Friday night looking forward to another challenge and a new opportunity to learn and improve.
We came third, behind LRG and Tiger Bay and ahead of Rainy, LRR and CCR. The girls got their first win and just kicked ass all weekend, finishing the tournament with 4 wins and 2 losses and hopefully having increased our league’s rep as tough teams but a lovely bunch of humans. They got medals. Never have I been so unbelievably happy to see third place medals, I will be forever grateful to CCR for that. The line-up manager did a great job and went on to play for the B Team in between many naps and I managed not to make a show of them either. Or if I did they never showed it. Even when I bought them cheap prosecco and one of the corks landed on track during the tournament’s final between LRG and Tiger Bay.
Looking back at that weekend, and in comparison the year that followed, that tournament created the blueprint for how we do things for all games now. Amazing forward planning, organisational skills and over pronunciation of French words are the standard now from our amazing Co Captains Gnash and Crash and this has made our games days much more relaxed as a result. Trying to travel in groups, staying in the same place, booking places to eat as a team, Ciara’s awesome warm ups and game day plans, have all become part of a B Team’s DNA and all habits we picked up last October.
It’s also where we learned who we are on track, what our derby looks like. We learned how to see out games and protect leads, how to run a game clock, how to keep going to the last jam and how to keep our heads when we’re losing or the calls are going against us. We learned hard lessons from some great teams that we still talk about today and afterwards we looked at where we were and where we wanted to be and we’ve been headed that way ever since.
This October it’s fitting that as an anniversary we’re starting a run of five games in four weeks. The team is a different group in comparison to the one that skated in Birmingham last October, in personnel and in mentality. Internal promotions to our A team, transfers, people retiring and our killer Alts becoming full B team has all changed our roster significantly. Mentally we’ve gotten stronger, refined our style of derby and continued to learn from our opponents.
We’ve learned so much this year from the great teams we’ve played, the refs and officials we’ve worked with and even more from everyone involved in our own league. Personally the coaches, skaters and officials within DRD have been patient, helpful and understanding as I’ve tried to be a better bench coach for my skaters, and no one has been more patient or understanding with me than my own Beamies. They’ve been so supportive as I’ve made the transition from a player of other sports to a coach in derby. They’re hard working, brave, honest, loyal, and they just don’t stop fighting for me and for each other. In this year together I think we’ve moved towards where we said we wanted to be last October, growing and improving every day. I’ve even learned how to open cheap prosecco trackside without endangering skaters.
#beone
fouloutboy (al)
