(cw: anxiety, i guess? just like self-doubt and self-hatred in general)
so two weekends ago now i played in my first roller derby games and i kind of had a lot of weird feelings and emotions coming out of them so i just wanted to try to explore them in writing right here on cohost dot org slash meg.
the tournament itself was specifically for rookies, and games were 20 minutes long instead of the usual hour. my team played twice and lost both times; our first game was pretty close and our second wasn't at all. that was a bummer!
i want to lead off by saying: i played pretty badly! i took a lot of penalties and when i was on the track i had too much of a tendency to go off and do things on my own rather than sticking with my teammates and trying to stay strong as a team. the first game was disastrous for me and i think it'd be pretty fair to say i lost us that game. as a jammer i took two bad penalties near the end of jams that basically took our ability to score off the table for a pretty significant portion of the game. i ended up fouling out near the end while we were down by only a single digit score; seeing as we were already only a team of 10 playing a sport that requires 5 players on the track at a time, we probably would've had a real shot of making a run at it had my dumb ass not put that little extra strain on my teammates and coaches.
we just clearly weren't particularly prepared, which in hindsight makes a ton of sense. especially in our second game, we were reacting to situations we were seeing for the first time that our opponents clearly had at least a slightly better handle on. they came in with a strategy they'd run before and were confident in their ability to execute. we came in with a strategy in theory that we hadn't really run through in any sort of real game situation and as such were trying to work out the kinks of it on the spot. and with most of us having absolutely zero experience, this led to hesitation which was very easy for our opponents to capitalize on. honestly we have a number of super talented players on our team and i think with a little more experience we could really do something. but we had none, and we didn't.
rules-wise, there's only so much you can learn in practice, and honestly a lot of us were learning the rules as we were being called for penalties lol. i don't blame anyone for this, it's just an unfortunate fact that it's a whole different situation to be running drills or scrimmaging in practice with like two or three coaches watching everyone than playing in a game with a whole ref team specifically watching closely to make sure you're not making the slightest error. of the seven (7!!!) penalties i took across the two games (reminder the games were only 20 minutes each) there's really only one i disagree with and even that one was probably technically correct.
anyways, all that to say: we played two games, lost twice, and i wasn't really proud of the way i played. it's not like there were any huge outside pressures on our performance in this tournament (i think everyone understood we weren't exactly world-beaters, lol) but i still came out of it feeling like i let people down. the two days immediately after our games were pretty rough for me, i was feeling just rotten and legitimately considering whether i wanted to stick with the sport. my brain, it must be said, does this funny little thing that whenever i try something and it doesn't go completely perfectly the first time it throws an absolute fit and tries to convince me to never try anything again. i was feeling a lot of that, and i was at the very least able to recognize it and stop entertaining that line of thinking eventually. but still, it was a bummer to have built up this tournament for like, at least half a year at this point only to leave it feeling rotten. a lot of it's my own mental issues and i don't think it'd be fair to myself or to the sport to quit it after my very first games, no matter how bad i think they went, when i've also legitimately had fun times and met some wonderful people in the buildup to them. really my main takeaway was that it wasn't roller derby that made me feel this bad, it was my own mental issues that prevent me from accepting my own imperfections that did it. but like, unless my plan is to Never Do Anything Ever Again, Ever (tempting), nothing's going to get better from quitting.
i will say i did look really cool in my uniform, tho.
tl;dr: doller rerby