Flamingo takes off! - NSOing done right

Whew, what a weekend!  It's been heavy on the NSO side of things, but all in very good ways.  I feel like I've graduated into NSO-dom or something.

On Saturday my fellow Dolly Newbie and NSO compadre Quillotine hoofed it down to Cambridge (despite GoogleMaps' attempt to make it otherwise) to help out as a double-header between the Rockabillies and Granite City, and then a B team game between Cambridge and Suffolk.  They were short a few positions so she hopped on as a Scorekeeper and I took care of the Inside Whiteboard.

What was extra nice is that Quill and I were the two candidates for Deputy HNSO with the Dollies (she won, and I am the Deputy's Deputy :D), so the fact that we were travelling two hours together to help out another team made a lot of sense.  It was like a Derby Officiating lovefest!



Cambridge seem to be a very skilled bunch, with a high emphasis on rule knowledge and NSO experience for everyone, skaters included, which obviously I liked.  I think it was probably the first game where I've had enough experience to feel really confident in my ability to NSO the position I'm in and also to fully appreciate what's going on behind the scenes.  In contrast to my previous (and first) away game, everything ran like clockwork.  Like any good ninja or Special Effects technician, the way you can tell a good NSO is that you barely notice they're even there.  Everything should run so smoothly that not a single disturbance in the Force is detected by anyone else in the game.

We were on a very well organised team, most of the NSOs had prior experience in their roles and I was lucky enough to have the impeccable Tome Raider as Penalty Tracker.  Even at the end of the second game, when the crowd went a bit nuts for several jams in a row, we couldn't hear a single thing the refs said, and we had three skaters penalised simultaneously on two occasions, between the two of us we still picked up every one of them.  Go Team Flamingo!

The following day we had a scrim at home between the Dollies and Nottingham's Hellfire Harlots.  On Sunday the advanced and newbie skaters practise at the same time so I was meant to be training, but we needed NSOs and I've been feeling pretty good about my skating progress the last few weeks, so I opted to man the game instead.  After about 20mins of some pretty serious warmups and practicing getting power into our strides, I switched to the other side of the hall, ripped my pads off and pulled my pink Tshirt onto my sweaty self.
Yum.
Because of who we had available, I ended up having two jobs.  I was Jam Timer and Penalty Tracker!  I did get a Wrangler, and even though she hadn't NSOed penalties before and didn't know the hand signs, it was a big help to have an extra pair of ears and eyes, and also someone to send to the refs for missed codes while I was minding the Jam Stopwatch.  She caught almost all the skater numbers (which is the part I sometimes miss, especially standing in the middle) and when she didn't know the code she wrote the penalty out in full so she could show me exactly what was said.

And the best part was... it went great!  It took my a few jams to get my head in the game and figure out how to balance the two roles, and there were a few moments when I was scrambling between a clipboard, two stopwatches and a lanyard whistle.  But after a few cues from Skew it all clicked into place fairly quickly.  Tracking is a little quicker to do than Whiteboard (less area to scan for skater numbers!) which definitely helped.  We got every penalty in the end, I didn't do anything horrendously daft, and the game went without a hitch.

A lot of the time Roller Derby can look a lot like the lead singer in a rock band.  It seems to be about the skaters, only the skaters, and the jammers in particular.  But, like any band, without your other members, your roadies and your sound-desk technicians, it's just some daft idiot singing in an empty concert hall.  You've GOT to have your referees, your NSOs, or the game just won't work.  The score will be wrong, rules will be broken without consequence, you'll have 3 minute jams, one team might get extra timeouts, or not enough!  It'd be chaos.  Any roller derby team worth it's salt will show it's officials the love they deserve.  At the very least they'll be the first to dash inside the track after a game and shake hands with their hard-working refs.  Ideally you also want a culture that big-ups officials as much as players, and that's much harder to achieve, especially when your team is new or small or short on teachers.  I've realised how lucky we are to have good refs, particularly Orla Skew, who is pulling double duty while we're a ref short due to injury.  There's a level of dedication and excellence in her patience and teaching that's made it astoundingly easy to pick up NSOing.  A compliment from her means a lot.  And now we're getting to the point where we can teach the next lot.

It's reassuring too, because maybe you don't want to be a jammer, maybe you're injured or pregnant and off skates for a while, maybe you discover that you don't really want to hit people, maybe you want to attend games but are unlikely to make the A-team.  But there's still a place in this sport for you.  You may not be on the bench, but you're always in the team.