When you’re watching WFTDA.tv and you realize they forgot to turn off facial recognition on the camera

What Makes Roller Derby Special Isn’t Unique (And That’s Okay)

I was reading an article earlier today that made me appreciate something. Here are a few excerpts from it, which all echo a common refrain.

Think of your personal experiences with roller derby. Playing it, watching it, being a part of the community. All of the above rings true. It's hard to imagine roller derby being any other way.

It might be even more difficult to put any other sport up against roller derby for being as uniquely embraced by its players.

Or is it?

Because truth be told, I was being slightly dishonest when I was relaying those quotes. Although all of the author’s words sound exactly like roller derby, the sport he was talking about was, in fact, not roller derby.

The article these quotes come from is titled An American Rugby League, written by Phil MacKenzie, the captain of the San Diego team of PRO Rugby. He and his team are part of the just-launched professional rugby union competition, the first of its kind in the United States.

Reading the article, I couldn't not see the parallels between the culture of rugby and the culture of roller derby. Anyone that's played both, of which there are certainly quite a few of you out there, will know what I'm talking about.

But the way MacKenzie described rugby, from him discovering the game as a young person all the way through to his efforts in undertaking a "historic opportunity" for the sport, would literally be no different if a modern skater was talking about roller derby, from her discovering the game to helping the WFTDA effort to make some history of its own.

I mean, you could just as easily swap "rugby" with “roller derby” in most of the article (which I did above) and still completely agree with it (which I’d bet my house that you did).

What fascinates me about modern roller derby is how it’s the very first organized sport that many of its participants, primarily women, have ever played. That the sport just happens to be roller derby is all kinds of awesome.

However, a lot of the stuff that derbyists hold so dear about roller derby, what makes roller derby special—the sports(wo)manship, the camaraderie, the respect for your fellow competitor, the “we’re all in this together” mentality—isn’t actually unique to roller derby.

What it is, is unique to sports.

Other sports have all of that stuff, too. The two most similar to roller derby in that regard are rugby and hockey. But other team sports like football, baseball, basketball, soccer, lacrosse, volleyball, auto racing, Ultimate, you name it…all of these sports have, at some level and in their own ways, the same kind of culture of togetherness among teammates and competitors alike.

Granted, roller derby is unique in that it’s one of the few organized sports out there that is almost exclusively run by the players that play it.

But when it comes to the culture of the actual sport, as played between the whistles? It’s special, yeah. But it’s not unique, because the culture of other sports played at the amateur level can be and often is just as great.

Just one of many reasons why sports are special—and why we should be thrilled that we can say roller derby is a sport, too.

When What Derby Says Doesn’t Always Jive With What It Does

I saw this post on Facebook today. It’s a perfect example of a major point of annoyance I have had with the modern roller derby movement up to now. (A general annoyance, not specifically with Bay Area, who are of course awesome.)

Do you notice how derbyfolk constantly use words like “athleticism!” and “strategy!” and the others to self-describe themselves to people outside of the community? In some sense it has been necessary to try and differentiate the modern sport from the game that was played in the 60s and 70s. But is it necessary anymore?

It’s 2016, and more and more of the people with disposable income nowadays aren’t old enough to know, or care, that there was an old roller derby that wasn’t “athletic” or “strategic” in the manner being implied here by Bay Area, or any flat track league looking to attract attention or promote the sport overall. All people see now is an organization asking you to pay money to watch the games they put on, no different than any other team or sporting club that does the same thing.

All sports are athletic, to varying degrees. All sports are strategic. All (team) sports require teamwork. Is there some specific reason why roller derby needs to continue to state the bleeding obvious, when all other sports do not? Especially for a sport that’s emerged enough to be carried on an ESPN platform?

(You should watch basketball! It’s athletic! It’s got strategy! It requires teamwork! Basketball!)

There’s no debating that today’s skaters aren’t athletes. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean the important (”strategic”) things that happen in a typical game of WFTDA roller derby are athletic, or as exciting to watch, as skaters are convinced they are.

If today’s roller derby was as exciting/athletic/strategic to outside fans as it was five or six years ago, the majority of roller derby leagues would be pulling in the crowds they were five or six years ago. It’s as simple as that.

Lately, things appear to have at least stabilized. The crowd at WFTDA Champs in Minnesota looked quite healthy. That’s good, but it still doesn’t change the ease with which the everyman appreciated derby back then, as opposed to the difficulty many leagues face in convincing them now.

This ties into something else about the modern community that irks me, which is how people balk at the notion of making the modern game more “entertaining” to help with attracting and retaining fans. Perhaps still put off by the over-the-topness of Ye Olde Roller Derby, this subset of modern derby doesn’t want to do that because they feel it will detract from the pure sport and pure athleticism of what today’s game is all about.

But aren’t sports fundamentally entertaining? Why does someone plunk down money to watch a baseball game, a basketball game, a football game, a hockey game, a soccer game, a lacrosse game, an Ultimate (Frisbee) game, a track and field meet…at the pro, collegiate, high school or any other level?

It’s because people want to appreciate athletes going up against each other in a well-contested, exciting, entertaining game. They want to see athletes out-athlete each other, in a manner that constantly piques their interest. 

Roller derby today is not doing that very well. Certainly not as well as it was doing in 2009 and 2010 when roller derby was enjoying record attendance from regular people. Back then, we liked to say that people came for the flash and attitude, but came back because the roller derby was pretty damn amazing.

Today, they’re coming because roller derby says it’s a great sport that’s athletic and strategic. If fans aren’t coming back, it’s because what roller derby is saying isn’t jiving with what it’s actually doing on the track—like doing things that are not actually athletic or strategic.

Because if fans are being promised “exciting athleticism, strategy, and teamwork,” but WFTDA skaters are still playing a game where a jam like this…

…is still entirely a thing that can possibly and legally happen under existing rules, all they’re doing is setting up a situation where someone else can come in and give the fans the athletes and compelling gameplay that they’ve been missing for half a decade.

Analysis Preview: The Home Team Challenge

Like most of us, I go to home team games put on by the local roller derby league. Unlike most of you, I’m fortunate enough to be in the vicinity of a banked track roller derby league, and to go to home team games put on by that league.

That league is, of course, the L.A. Derby Dolls.

When L.A. moved into their new home, the Dolleseum, they jumped right into a 12-game home season over the course of just six months. It was the first time they played in a double round-robin format for as long as I’ve been around, not to mention that many games in such a short period of time.

It was also an extremely competitive season. Of all of those games played, I could only recall one truly “bad” game, and maybe one or two mediocre ones. But every single game past that, including a stretch of five or six in a row, was extremely close through the first half at least. Many more games went deep into the fourth quarter, and a decent number of them went all the way to the last jam, including the championship game.

Out of curiosity, I went back through all of the games played in the 2015 LADD home season, just to see what this level of parity in competition looked like statistically.

Banked track data tracking isn’t as rich as it is in the WFTDA, so there’s no realistic way to calculate PPJ or MJD without manually tracking it at every game. But we do have the final scores, and the average score gap of all games played throughout the season.

I was a little surprised at how many games weren’t as close on the final scoreboard as they felt watching them live, and that this average wasn’t lower than I thought it was in my head.

It was here that I realized something: Just what is a good home season supposed to look like, anyway?

Every year, I track the scores and stats at the WFTDA Championships to check up on the progress of interleague competition among the top WFTDA teams. More close games and fewer blowouts is ultimately what everyone wants to see, and a lot us use this as a gauge to measure progress in the competitive aspect of the sport.

However, the level of parity in high-level interleague competition means very little to leagues that rely heavily on having a popular home team season to get fans to come out and spend money on tickets, concessions, merch, etc. Especially in the places where home teams are more popular than all-star travel teams, which is quite a few places.

In reality, the home seasons are where we should be focusing on to determine whether or not roller derby is getting more competitive in general. Every league has full control over their teams. Through various means, they can balance competition within their league, like allowing the weakest team the first pick of graduating juniors or top fresh meat skaters every season.

Ideally, a well-managed home league should more-or-less have balanced rosters leading to consistently putting on good-to-great games for their fans a majority of the time. Certainly, a low amount of bad games or blowouts. There will always be unbalanced teams here and there due to injuries or league transfers, but among several leagues over several years we should expect that these bumps will be smoothed out due to the law of averages.

This has inspired me to undertake an absolutely massive analysis project, which I am calling the Home Team Challenge. I will be collecting and organizing the home team scores of a significant number of WFTDA leagues, and any non-WFTDA leagues (RDCL, MADE) big enough to support a full home season, to see what there is to see.

And not just current or recent home team seasons, either. I'm going to try and go back as far and as deep as I can, for as many leagues as I can. I’m talking as many as 40 or 50 leagues, at least as far back as 2009 or 2008. (This seems to be the limit as far as statistical robustness goes in some of the league websites and Facebook pages I’ve dug through already.) With all of this data we can start asking, and getting answers to, some very intriguing questions:

• Was the massive drop-off of fan attendance from the peak levels in 2009 and 2010 in any way attributable to less competitive home league seasons throughout the country?

• How did WFTDA rule changes over the years affect competition within the isolated and more consistent environment of a home league season?

• Provided enough data exists for them to make a comparison, do leagues playing non-WFTDA rule sets have intraleague seasons that are—at least according to the final score—more competitive, less competitive, or about the same?

• Which leagues consistently have the most competitive or uncompetitive home league seasons, and why? Can this knowledge help other leagues put on more competitive home seasons as well?

• Do league championship games always pit the two best teams against one another? That is, are they always among the closest games of the year?

• Do higher-ranked WFTDA teams produce more competitive home team seasons? Does an all-star teams’ ranking have anything to do with how well that league’s home team season (if it has one) is doing?

That’s just the tip of the iceberg as far as how useful this data may be once I finish collecting it all in one easy-to-analyze place. Something of this magnitude is going to take a lot of time, probably the rest of this year, to collect the data and make up some whiz-bang visualizations from it. For that reason, this will be a side project that I’ll try to work on here and there, hopefully having it ready to go during the 2017 pre-season.

Having just gotten started, I’ve got data from as far back as 2008 for three leagues: Gotham, Rose City, and Bay Area. To pique your interest in this analysis project, let me show you the numbers from the 2015 home seasons of Gotham and Rose City.

First, Gotham, which has four home teams play in a simple six-game season with a single Championship game at the end, and has stuck to this format since pretty much the beginning.

As it turns out, last year Gotham had its most competitive home league season in its recorded history, which since 2008—that’s over eight years and 56 games—had an average score difference of 45 points. Not too shabby!

How about Rose City, then? Recently, the Rollers switched to a huge 14-game home season with their four teams, including a championship double-header.

Holy shit.

The chart speaks for itself. But to just add to it, in 2014 the league average score difference in Portland was 75 points, so things up there are getting worse in a hurry. When half-games results are adjusted to full-game score differences, Rose City’s home teams since 2009 have averaged a final score gap of 65 points—or 20 points less competitive than Gotham.

Fascinating, ain’t it?

As I collect data throughout the year, including from the current 2016 home seasons, I’ll try to drop in here on Scratchpad with any interesting home league nuggets I come across. I’m not sure if anything will be quite this dramatic, especially from a strong and stable league like Rose City. But with the size and depth of what I hope to collect…who knows?

MRW there is no new WFTDA rules update for me to do an analysis on this year

Read more here: http://rdn.link/1P6Kzwu

Well, this was unexpected

Roller Derby is More Prevalent in Finland than in the United States

No, it’s not. But yet, it is.

The WFTDA released the long-awaited results of the global roller derby census it conducted earlier this year. Participants were asked for some basic information about where they were and what their role in roller derby was, so that the WFTDA could get a better idea of just how many roller derbyists were out there in the world.

In the end, about 30,000 responses were tabulated from people in 79 different countries, though only 20 countries got enough responses (more than 100) for meaningful data. These 20 countries accounted for 27,399 census responses; the other 59 countries would have to therefore average out to around 30 to 40 responses each to make up the difference. That’s not too shabby!

The WFTDA inexplicably released the data as prettified individual PDF files for each country, rather than as a text table containing them all at once. A bit annoying for a spreadsheet jockey like me, but the data is always appreciated no matter what form it takes. Later on I may dig into things deeper and see what there is to see, but I had an immediate curiosity that I needed to satisfy.

Here is the top 8 list of countries represented in the census, and their respective number of respondents. The U.S. rules the roost in roller derby, of course.

1. United States - 15,924 (WFTDA Census respondents) 2. United Kingdom - 2,478 3. Canada - 2,257 4. Australia - 1,639 5. France - 1,187 6. Finland - 505 7. Germany - 504 8. Argentina - 408

My initial thought at looking at this list: The United States is a very big country with a population of 332.6 million people. Other derby-faring countries, like New Zealand with a total of 4.6 million, are very small in comparison.

Let’s think about these survey responses in terms of ratios instead. For example, if 5 million Americans participated in a sport, that would represent 1.5% of potential participants. If 200,000 Kiwis participated in a sport, that would translate to a 4.3% play rate.

The total number of players may be 25 times less in NZ, but it actually works out to three times more players relative to the participant potential, making that sport much more popular in that country by comparison.

(By the way: These numbers represent a Wikipedia estimate of players in Ultimate (Frisbee) in the U.S.; and rugby in New Zealand, respectively.)

Since roller derby is still an emerging sport around the world, it’s played by a very, very small percentage of the population/potential player base of each country. But they count all the same. Which one has the most people involved with roller derby in relation to their population?

1. Finland - 0.00935% of the population is involved with roller derby 2. New Zealand - 0.00730% 3. Australia - 0.00694% 4. Canada - 0.00636% 5. United States - 0.00494% 6. Ireland - 0.00404% 7. United Kingdom - 0.00390% 8. Sweden - 0.00386%

Woah, Finland! It’s the most derby-mad country in the world -- twice as popular as the United States, if you go by the data in the WFTDA census. New Zealand had the 10th highest respondent count (336), but is second best proportionally. Australia and Canada swap spots from the headcount tally but still combinate the 3 and 4 spots. 

It’s interesting that the United States is fifth on this list. We have no way of knowing what level of accuracy this census has, if the 16,000 American respondents are really every single person in derby today or are only the 30% that bothered to fill out the survey.

But think about this: If the U.S. population participation rate in roller derby was as high as it was in Finland, more than 30,000 people would have filled out the WFTDA census in this country alone.

Not to read too much into things, but doesn’t that make you wonder if the growth of the sport in the United States is underperforming just a bit?

"River City Rumble," the 2015 MRDA Championships, are this weekend. Yeah, it's going to be kind of like that. Watch for our preview on Friday.

WFTDA Rollergames, Featuring the WALL OF DEATH !?!

As you may know, roller derby is set to make an historic appearance (or return, if you know better) to ESPN. Specifically, the sports giant’s streaming platform, ESPN3. Viewers in the United States can (must) watch the third and final day of WFTDA Championships, November 8, on ESPN3.com. Neat!

I regularly watch sports on ESPN3. The other day, I looked ahead in the upcoming listings to see the scheduled event. I found it. And then I giggled a bit.

Look at the category of sport ESPN is filing WFTDA Champs under.

Yeah, that says “ROLLERGAMES.”

Naturally, this was the first thing that came to mind:

I’m going to assume that you know exactly what this is. (If you don’t, you’re in for one hell of a surprise.) That ESPN would file a modern roller derby competition under an obviously generic “Rollergames” category, given the historic meaning of the term under a roller derby purview, is deliciously ironic.

But a minor oversight like this is trivial, and really not worth continuing on about.

Instead, I’ll share with you a brief history of and resurgence of the term Roller Games/Rollergames, which is suddenly popping up in a lot of roller derby places these days:

1) The origin of term Roller Games was born sometime in the early 1960s, as a rival promotion that split away from Jerry Seltzer’s Roller Derby. Headed by Bill Griffiths, Sr. (who passed away earlier this year), it would ultimately gain global notoriety and fame as Roller Games International through its most famous team, the Los Angeles Thunderbirds (aka the L.A. T-Birds). Roller Games was much more theatrical and over-the-top than Roller Derby was, and much of the “derby is fake” talk stems from Games much more than what Jerry did in the 60s and 70s.

2) The Japanese satellite of Roller Games ultimately turned into Roller Game (singular -- because, Japan), a high-octane full-throttle version of roller derby. The Japanese game was played with only one jammer on the track at a time (every jam was a power jam), but alternated between teams. It was also quite full contact; jammers wore full-face motorcycle helmets for identification and protection. Today, Roller Game Japan is still going strong, led by Japanese roller derby legend Hiroshi Koizumi. He puts on a few games/performances a year in his Tokyo roller rink, and last year opened an ENORMOUS banked track for training. He’s also got something planned for 2016…

3) In the late 1980s, a powerful television producer named David Sams, who already had big hits like Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, and Oprah on his resume, approached Griffiths at Roller Games to make a new kind of show for syndication. A roller derby TV show. The show, which would ultimately be called Rollergames, debuted in the summer of 1989, and was an instant ratings smash. Teams did battle on a one-of-a-kind figure-8 track that featured a steeply banked “Wall of Death,” a crossover jump ramp, and most famously an alligator pit used during “Sudden Death” overtime. It was one of those shows so ridiculously terrible, it was awesome. It also died before the first season was over, due to financial reasons.

4) Fast-forward a few decades. The International Roller Sports Federation, FIRS, begins an initiative to unify the world championships of the various roller-skating sport disciplines under its watch -- virtually all of them -- into a showcase event on the level of the X-Games or the Olympics. The Roller Games - 2017 FIRS World Championships will be held in Barcelona. It will also be the first time FIRS sanctions a roller derby competition…provided it can figure out just what kind of competition it will be and what teams/players/officials will populate it. Because it ain’t happening with the WFTDA’s support.

5) Back to Japan. Koizumi recently announced that he is bringing that monster banked track and his style of gameplay to the United States, starting off with a festival and exhibition to be held in Los Angeles in March 2016. It will be called, of course, ROLLERGAMES World Cup 2016, between Japan and a TBD USA team. This will actually be the third World Cup exhibition played in the Roller Game style, the last of which was held in Japan in 1994. The 1993 version was quite the ride:

I met Koizumi at Rollercon earlier this year, where I learned he has some very ambitious plans for a potential future professional version of (legitimate) roller derby. It’s something to keep an eye on!

6) And finally, ROLLERGAMES is the category that the WFTDA Championships is getting filed under in the ESPN3 listings. It’s a phrase that has a lot of history behind it -- history that ESPN is probably oblivious to. Who knows? Maybe if the WFTDA-ESPN deal is extended, the WFTDA will get correctly categorized as “ROLLER DERBY.” Ultimately, isn’t that what we all want to see?

What is Roller Derby? Let’s ask the Internet.

The perception of reality is often more important than reality itself.

What Immediately Came to Mind on the JFTDA Being “For the Skater, By the Skater”

“Hey kids, it’s time for dinner! I’ve made us a healthy, well-balanced meal we can all enjoy together!”

“Aw geez, mom! You know we don’t like broccoli.”

“Broccoli is good for you! It will help you stay healthy.”

“Well, about that, mom. Alice and I have been talking among ourselves. We’ve come to the conclusion that our dinner choices shouldn’t be in anyone else’s hands but our own. We’ve voted to declare ourselves an autonomous democracy!”

“What are you saying, Julie? I’m your mother! I love you! I want nothing but the best for your future. You can trust me to make the right decisions for you and Alice. I’ve got the experience and knowledge to guide you. Besides, you’re just barely 10 years old!"

“Sorry mom, you just don’t understand us kids. We’re going to vote for what we want for dinner. All in favor of ice cream, say aye! (Aye!) (Aye!) All opposed, say no!”

“No! You can’t have ice cream for dinner! You need to eat your veggies! I know you hate them, but they’re good for you and you need them!”

“Sorry mom, the vote has been decided, 2 against 1 in favor of ice cream. We’re going to go over to Grace’s house and get all the ice cream we want! Later!”

*mumbles* “That’s the last time I’m going to have Uncle Jerry tell them about what’s good for them…”

Using Statistics to Prove if “That Game Was Better Than the Final Score Indicates”

I hear this phrase a lot. Especially during the playoffs. ESPECIALLY when a game winds up being not-so-close in the end. Sometimes, it’s true. Most times, it’s not, if only because most times the final score is exactly reflective of how boring and uncompetitive a game winds up being.

Watching the WFTDA playoffs this year, however, I noticed that there actually have been a couple of games so far where the final score was quite deceptive. Two in particular stick out, including one from this weekend.

D2 Cleveland: Brandywine 216, Treasure Valley 157 (a 59 point difference) D1 Tucson: Madison 221, Arizona 171 (a 50 point difference)

If you didn’t see the games and had only the final scores to go off of, you’d just think these were merely borderline-competitive and perhaps not particularly noteworthy. But those that watched them happen know how crazy-tight they were, only for the games to fall apart at the end with one of the teams building a large gap up quickly.

This disparity between the final score and the equality of opponents has led me to develop a new statistic that can easily quantify (and remove personal bias in gauging) the closeness of a game from start to finish, as opposed to just its finish. I call it the Median Jam Difference, or MJD for short. The premise of MJD is to use a single number to demonstrate how close a game stays from jam-to-jam, and for how long it stays close.

It’s pretty simple to calculate: Record the score gap between each team after each jam, then take the median of all those numbers. That result is the MJD for that game, in points. I’ll give you the MJDs for the two games above to explain what the number means:

D2 Cleveland: Brandywine 216, Treasure Valley 157 (MJD: 10 points) D1 Tucson: Madison 221, Arizona 171 (MJD: 6 points)

Being a median value, the MJD is the dividing line that tells us how close the game was after 50% of the jams. Take the Madison/Arizona game as an example. Despite ending with a 50 point score difference, its MJD of 6 points says that at the end of half of the jams (21 of 42 in this case), the teams were 6 points or fewer apart on the scoreboard. That’s ridiculously tight for a very significant portion of the game!

It’s not a stretch to understand that a good number of the other jams had to have a score difference not much larger than 6 points. In this case, it happened that 36 out of 42 jams, or 85% of the game, saw the teams no more than 20 points apart. It wasn’t until the last three or four jams where the bottom truly fell away from Arizona.

Here’s the full rundown of all the jams so you can see what this looks like:

Obviously, the lower the MJD, the better the game. A lower number indicates it was harder for teams to open up a score gap and pull away from each other for a significant amount of time, which of course makes for a very tight contest throughout. This statistic can also be applied over groups of games as an overall measurement of how equal teams are in games across the board. (This is different than our Points Per Jam (PPJ) stat, which measures competition for points among teams during individual jams.)

Seeing as I just invented this idea three hours before I write this, I’m going to need more time to check it against the previous WFTDA playoff data I’ve recorded and see if there are some other hidden gems that are betrayed by the final score. When I get into a more proper statistical analysis for the Division 1 playoffs, we’ll get a good indication if the roller derby is indeed better than the final scores may indicate—or if players and announcers and are just bullshitting themselves to prevent a team’s feelings from being hurt.

Predicting the Ending of that Jet City/Columbia Playoff Game

Did you see it? Last jam of the game, Jet City is up by one point, with a brief power start. At the start of a jam, all of Jet’s blockers take a knee, deliberately causing a No Pack situation. Destroying the Pack penalty to Jet. They stay down. Failure to Reform Penalty on Jet.

Meanwhile, Columbia’s blockers are desperate to prevent Jet from getting lead status, which would end the game. But they can’t legally block! Blocking Out of Play penalty to Columbia. Weak wall, refs screaming No Pack. Columbia has to let the Jet Jammer go.

Jet waits for time to expire and calls the jam. Game over. Jet wins, despite committing two blocker penalties the other team had absolutely no way to take advantage of.

I predicted something like this would happen—4½ years ago.

…or perhaps, a game on ESPN3.

This is from The Pack Problem, the very first “White Paper” I wrote on the old blog back in April 2011. For all the improvements the WFTDA has made to its rules over the years, there’s still the One Big Issue it has not been addressing, and has been refusing to address. It’s the same issue I pointed out years ago, and have been continuing to bring up.

If two competing teams are required to cooperate to keep a pack together, they will not do it when it is to their advantage, ultimately “breaking” the game.

When “cheating” happened before, I infamously pointed it out. But here it is all again.

Here’s how you fix this: During a No Pack situation, do not eliminate the engagement zone. (The RDCL uses this method during “Split Pack” situations.) If a team wants to destroy the pack, let them pick up their penalties. But allow the other team to stay together and legally block to their hearts’ content.

That way, there is no possible scenario where a team can game the system. All playing passively or illegally would do is give the opponents free reign to remain in their wall and destroy the opposing jammer. Wouldn’t that scenario make much more sense than one where a team expends no effort, deliberately breaks the rules, but is still guaranteed victory anyway?

WindyMan’s RollerCon 2015 Schedule

I’ve finally got most of my RollerCon schedule pinned down. I’m not doing any seminars this year, but I will be trying out some PA announcing for the first time at Ye Olde Banked Tracke. I’ll also be handing out the Flat Track/Banked Track Rules & Strategy Guide flyers there, as well as at other times as noted below. Don’t forget to download the digital version to your phone if you haven’t already!

If you want to say “hi,” or some other monosyllabic words to me, here are some of the times and places we are likely to cross paths. See everyone there!

Tuesday

4p-6ish - Arrive/Registration Line (Flyer Handouts if you’re in line by me) 6-7p - Pre-RollerCon Walking Tour

Wednesday

9a-10a - Banked Track: Flat to Tilty: RDCL Rules Overview* 1:30p-2:30ish - Track 1: B&T vs. fiveonfive 2:30p-4:30p - Banked Track Challenges/Rules Guide Flyer Handout 5p-6ish - The Pool: International Happy Hour 6:45p-7:15ish - Track 1: All-Star Game 7:30p-8:30p - Seminar 213: RDCL Open Roundtable/Rules Guide Handout 9:30p-OH GOD WHY- Banked Track: WFTDA Rules Banked Scrimmage

*This happens every day at the banked track. Depending on how well I sleep during the week, I may come to all of these sessions to help talk up RDCL derby, pass out rules guide flyers, and gauge skater reaction to the rules differences. But definitely Wednesday/Thursday for sure!

Thursday

9a-10a - Banked Track: Flat to Tilty/RDCL Rules Overview* 10:30a-11:30a - Seminar 233 - RDCL Crash Course for WFTDA Refs 12p-1:30p - Seminar 235 - Mainstreaming Derby: Why & How? 1:30p-3:15ish - Banked Track Challenges/Rules Guide Flyer Handout 3:30p-4:15ish - Brown Paper Tix Booth: Roller Derby 80th Birthday Party 4:15ish-5p - Banked Track Bout/Rules Guide Flyer Handout 6:15p-7p - Track 2: Star Trek vs. Star Wars 7p-8ish - Track 1: Bitch Please vs. Side Eye 9p-Who Knows When - Ballroom: Riedell Party

Friday

9:30ish? - Track 2: Cupcakes vs. Twinkies w/Special Handout! (Maybe) 10:30a-11:15ish - Track 1: Riedell vs. Antik 11:30a-1p - Seminar 233: USARS Meet & Greet/Rules Guide Handout 1:30p-2:15p [ANNOUNCING] - Banked: Compression Shorts vs. Fishnets 2:15p-5p - Banked Track Bouts & Challenges/Rules Guide Handout 4:30p-6p - Track 1: Magic Mike vs. Chippendale’s 6:45p-8:45p - Track 1: Caulksuckers vs. Vagine Regime 9:30p-Retirement - Track 1: Dentures (over 50) vs. Viagra (over 40)

Saturday

10:30a-12ish - Track 1: Arizona vs. Richmond (WFTDA Regulation) 12p-1p - Seminar 231: Roller Derby Author Panel 1:30p-3p - Track 1: USARS Rules Showcase/Rules Guide Handout 3p-5p [ANNOUNCING maybe?] - Banked: Pacific North Best vs. Beast Coast 5ish-6:30p - Track 1 - Arizona vs. Dallas (WFTDA Sanctioned) 7:15p-8:45p - Track 1 - Dallas vs. Richmond  (WFTDA Regulation) 9p-’Till I Puke - The Pool: Black ‘n Blue Ball

Sunday

9:15a-10a (Maybe) - Track 2: Jane Fonda vs. Richard Simmons 1:30p-2:15p [ANNOUNCING] - Banked: LDS vs. RLDS 2:15p-3p - Banked Track: Charming vs. Nomads/Rules Guide Handout 3p-3:45p [ANNOUNCING] - Banked: SoCal vs. Great Lakes 3:45p-4:30p [ANNOUNCING] - Banked: Black & Blue vs. White & Gold Dress 6:30p-Until Demolition - Track 1: Riviera vs. The LVCC