The other weekend, the London Roller Girls, who are the largest most established league in the UK ran a "boot camp" to bring the leagues of the UK together and to help out the smaller leagues get a better understanding of exactly how to train, what you need and how to get your league up and rolling.

The venue used was the same sports centre that the LRG have put on their bouts at, with another coming in March. Which is a well maintained sports hall and reasonably easy to get too route wise. London is about 2 hours and thirty minutes from Birmingham so we had to make sure we set off plenty early to get down there in time and to allow for the dreaded M25 motorway, a winding concrete nemesis for the day tripper.

The Bootcamp had been split into ref sessions and skater sessions, so myself and Barry Fight went off to the officiating department, the 9 Central City girls who had made the journey kitted up and warmed up on the track. It was nice to see pretty much all the leagues of the UK represented (about 7 - hey c'mon, give us time!!) and the track was a blur of logo's and shirts from the various tribes of the United Kingdom and Scotland.

One of the problems facing ref's in the UK is that most of time 1 the one guy ref'ing for a league is the ONLY guy, this makes it hard to get practical experience where you can concentrate on one aspect of derby, instead you have to run around covering all bases, this was true for me of my old league and is the same for one of the guys I met Ref "Rolling Stoner"
of the Windsor Roller Girls, it's difficult to keep track of everything going on during a scrimmage so I'm very glad to be in a league now where there are other ref's to share the responsibilities.

Ref's went off to "ref camp" where we sat round and discussed various situations and how a referee crew would handle them before the afternoon session which was going to be centred around "practical" experience of ref'ing the pick up scrimmages which would be taking place after all the girls had finished their training session in the main hall.

The girls meanwhile, were doing blocking drills and discussing various tactics and techniques amongst themselves and the chance to train with girls from other leagues meant new blocking partners and new tips and tricks could be
picked up and shared in an information exchange, benefiting all involved. After a lunch break and another warm up, the girls donned black or white shirts for pick up scrimmages and all levels were encouraged to get involved with "noob" scrimmages as well as the more experienced girls hitting the track. The new girls seemed to love the chance of getting involved in scrimmages against skaters of similar ability and you cant help but feel like a proud parent sending
your kids off to school when you wave goodbye to a new girl as she rolls into battle for the first time!

Then the more experienced girls took turns and the ref's alternated positions to keep it fresh as well...I made the mistake of having a crack at outside track ref and found it hard to keep up! One to go back to when my speed and cornering are improved me thinks....

The whole idea was a superbly executed one and of great benefit to all the leagues, it allowed face to face meetings for people that before have only chatted on msypace or facebook and the practical benefits are of course obvious. Hopefully this will be the first of many national get togethers in the future...

Stay Sexy!

Chet Wisconsin

referee