What's In A Name?

One of the early defining moments of your Derby Career has to be that joyous moment when you see for the first time, your chosen Derby alter ego on the official name list (as you can see from the crappy photoshop image above), which recently I had the pleasure of happening to me, as “Rudyard Crippling” is now officially registered and all my own to merchandise the hell out of, should I feel the urge to. Still it’s good to know that it’s all official and that I won’t have the ever present risk that my chosen Derby name snatched away from me by some equally witty person, who happened to submit their name registration before me.

Derby names are within the community one of the most important parts of the sport, outside of general skating ability and toughness, for these names form the basis of the characters we choose to play and it’s these characters which add to the colour and general fun of the sport, while helping us to escape yet further still from the hum drum of our work day week, which if your working week is anything like my own, will generally consist of listening to people complain about minor issues while generally trying to get through the working day as quickly as possible. Unsurprisingly the idea of getting to escape this necessary daily grind and play around as your warped alter ego, who when it comes to my own Derby ego is still a work in progress, but at least with my name being made official it at least means that I can now start to build a character, rather than create one and have to start completely from scratch when the name gets rejected.

Meanwhile with the team edging only closer to fielding our first official team and my confidence as a ref growing, I decided this week to update my Facebook profile to reflect my Derby alter ego, especially with so much of my Derby communications happening on there, not only with my own team but also with other teams and refs as well.

The original plan had been to have “Rudyard Crippling” in quotation marks between my first and last name, but alas for all the money which Facebook makes on a daily basis, it can’t for some reason handle this request. What is more frustrating about this situation is that some of the wenches have been able to get their name set out like this, which according to “Smack Torque” is down to harassing the admins, who are nigh impossible to contact, though honestly I would have thought that it would be easier to have the site accept quotation marks, than having to justify my reasons to the admins, for what is essentially a straightforward and simple request, still despite the fact the site makes millions of dollars a day and has had it's film legacy secured by the uber amazing David Fincher, I must continue to battle out my name rights with them.

So for now I'm not going to grumble but instead work on merchandising myself like a Mutha Trucker!

A Quick Update

Team Photo taken for Portsmouth News 15.01.11

So since the last post on here was almost two months ago I thought it was way due an update on here, even more so when the team continues to go from strength to strength, to the point were we have been forced to setup a waiting list for potential new skaters, with the interest in the team only growing since the team got featured in two local papers, with “R.I.P McMurphy” even becoming our first featured cover girl (or should be Cover wench?) for "The Daily Echo". Needless to say it was an interesting conversation trying to explain what derby was to my Grandparents, much less my Granny Mac referring to me by my derby name, after I sent them copies of the articles.

R.I.P McMurphy - The Southern Echo 15.01.11

Still while we might have a girls queuing up around the block to earn their place, sadly the same cannot be said for our hunt for Referee’s which so far has only attracted a couple of people, which in a way I can understand, especially as being a ref might not seem like the most exciting role to play seeing how you have the dusty tome, which is the rules of Roller Derby to memorise while the derby gals are having all that fun, skating hard and knocking lumps out of each other, but I’ve been honestly surprised by how much fun being a Ref is, especially seeing how fast paced this sport is, just calling penalties and looking out for misplays is strangely exhilarating and with stripes being so sliming what is there not to like about the role?

As part of my on going training regime for the role, I have frequently found myself sponging whatever tips and info I can off the ref’s from other more established teams, especially seeing how I’m the first ref this team had, so lacking in any form of senior ref to learn from, which only makes it all the more amusing when I have my fellow ref’s advising me to speak to the team’s Head ref, which via the process of elimination would mean that person is….err well me and seeing how talking to myself didn’t seem overly constructive, I have spent most of these last few months, no doubt bugging the hell out of any ref, willing to field my numerous questions. One person in particular I can credit as being a big help would be “Scoot’her” who is currently a ref with the “Brighton Rockers” and who was also nice to come and run a training session with the team, which was not only great in terms of giving us new drills to try, but also helped re-inspire my Derby Ref dream by helping me to refocus my efforts and to also show me a standard to aim for, which honestly really helps especially with not having a more senior ref in our league.

Outside of training it’s safe to say that my attempts to complete “The Roller Derby Challenge” failed miserably, thanks to various events which meant that I not only fell behind, but was left completely unmotivated in terms of running drills or anything else concerning the challenge, but I guess there will always be next year. Still in the meantime I’m still skating hard, even though I’m finding now that my gear is holding me back, in particular my skates, which are currently still the same Roller Derby M1 Vipers I started with, which I know a lot of skaters frown on and generally write off as being crap, but they have been good skates to learn with but now I generally find myself needing the next level of skate, so hence the reason I'm currently working stupid amounts of overtime in the forth circle of hell, better known as my day job (who contractally can't be named), trying to scrape the extra cash together to get myself a pair of Riedell’s, which would ideally be my next skates and which currently continue to elude me, thanks to bills mysteriously appearing as soon as I get close to the funds I need, so looks like I’m gonna be with my current skates for abit longer, unless some nice person at Riedell’s decides to send me a pair (hint hint).

Still with so many of the team getting close to passing minimum skills and hence allowing us to field our first team in the derby leagues, I’m only working harder to cram these rules and learn the various hand signals and whistles, so here’s hoping that it all eventually slots into place, otherwise I guess their might be more than a few confused folks, wondering what sort of confused version of the YMCA I appear to attempting on skates, which while no doubt amusing as hell, really isn’t constructive in terms of reffing.