I do love a good derby injury that isn’t going to keep me off skates or make my general life difficult. I did possibly my best fall ever on Saturday night. I was jamming and an opposing blocker hit me. I fell into their jammer, basically hitting her elbow with my face as she brought her arm up, then skidding into her as I fell, taking her legs out from under her and having her fall on top of me. I thought my nose was bust, so I didn’t get up straight away, which means everyone takes a knee and stares at you with concerned faces and it’s kind of embarrassing.
I touched my nose then looked at my hand and it was clear, no blood, so I said I was fine. ‘I’m not bleeding!’ and all these faces are peering at me and one girl says ‘I think you are bleeding, Carrie.’ Turns out my mouth guard had pushed up into my lip when I fell, and grazed it. Blood on my mouth guard! Derby right of passage! It didn’t bleed much and I sat the rest out with an ice pack to my face. It was nearly the end though so I didn’t miss much. My face is a little tender and the graze on my lip is sore, but I’m fine.
Scrimmage was good, for once. We’ve been playing in our teams for the last few weeks and poor Team Black are not doing so good. I’m Team Black by the way. But it came together tonight, we were working much better as a team, communicating, all the basic stuff we’d been rubbish at. Unfortunately there are only a few of us ‘old timers’ and a lot of newbies, and that means our strongest players will likely never be in a pack together, cos we need to help the others. This is v sad for me as I work well with a couple of those girls and I never get to skate with them. We went on in one jam together tonight, and it was beautiful. We sat on the other jammer for ages, knocking her out of bounds, making her v tired, while our jammer went round and round picking up points. We came off like, ‘Yeah! That is our winning pack baby!’ And then our bench coach pointed out the next team was all newbies and was struggling. So, no winning pack. Gah. Maybe we’ll get one jam in together.
Bout next Friday. As long as we play as well as we did tonight I’ll be happy. I had a lot of fun, and that’s what’s important.
I love how concise your writing is — it’s great. I hope you are well!
I am good thanks. Have upcoming bout nerves but should be fun.