games and coaching
coach’s corner by coach pauly
know your roll
part 17: TEAM
What is a team? Webster’s may have a different definition than I do, but I believe that a team is a group of people who train and work together to achieve a common set of goals. As a coach, it is my job to help that group rise above the obstacles and direct them toward achieving those goals. The one key is that we do all of this together: win, lose, or draw. No matter if we are playing teams that can wipe the floor with us or teams that are our equals. If we find ourselves in a situation where teams are not at the same skill level as us, we use that opportunity to refine our skills not destroy them for the sake of winning. Instead we play people out of their positions and try strategies we normally would not use. Sport is not just about winning in my viewpoint. It’s about honor and integrity in the face of adversity. It’s pitting your team against teams that you know will destroy you and taking a beating with class, taking what you learned to evolving your game. I was in Washington State and I had the pleasure of watching Charm City play Rat City. It was a hard fought game, which ended in Charm’s defeat. The beauty behind this is they came all the way across the country to take on Rose City and Oly before they faced Rat City. It is a great practice and many successful teams follow the same practice and have reaped the rewards. The more games you play against teams of equal or higher skills, the more you evolve your game. I call it the Highlander effect. In that movie the main characters collect the heads of their fallen opponents and absorb their power. Each bout you play you take some of the spirit of the team you play and use it to evolve your team each time. When I think of a team that I have seen recently, Terminal City comes to mind as a great example of how a team that plays regular higher level games can change their ranking by playing every weekend. From the beginning of interleague play, teams could only get better. The more you traveled, the better you got. One thing that you didn’t really see was sub players. I know this is really common for leagues starting out but not all-star teams. Since I have been in Western Canada, I have found that teams use this practice regularly. This year, my travel team has played in two tournaments in Western Canada. For each of these events, the rules allowed each team to add two skaters from anywhere to their roster. For the first tourney in Calgary (hosted by the
22 | Fall 2012 | fiveonfivemag.com
Chinook City Roller Derby) only three teams chose to bring their own roster without additional skaters. The other tournament was the second annual Best of the West regionals hosted by the CWRDA/RDAC organization. At this one it was the same situation. I have never experienced this practice at the travel team level. This practice robs teams of the glory, win or lose. It strips you of the ability to gauge your team’s performance if you have faced these teams before. If you win, the defeated team says that they didn’t have their full roster; if you lose you will never know if your team could have beat them without the additional players. Playing teams straight up eliminates any questions, which allows both teams to be proud either way. Beast of the East, on the other hand, is known for being the showcase for all the house teams in Eastern Canada to come together to enjoy a weekend of playing a travel team style tournament. It gives those house team players a chance to experience what their travel teams do regularly. I don’t have a firm grasp on what the rules are for that tournament, but from what I can gather each team is a house team representing their home league. If they are down skaters and need people to fill rosters, they can draw from their home league’s sub pool. Now we all know that in each league the home teams have travel team level skaters on their house team rosters, but I think the spirit of that tourney is to take the team you have straight up against the rest and see who rises to the top. I know some leagues use the A and B team structure and even in this case stacking your B team with A team players doesn’t help to further the sport or the level of play, it just means you can kick ass in a kindergarten. I have experienced this concept as a coach and as a spectator and honestly it just looks horrible. I know I am here to watch a competitive game. I know a few of you are asking, do one or two players make a difference? I say yes they do depending on what the team lacks to start with. If you look at the outcome of the Dust Devil Tourney in Arizona you can see what three key skaters added or subtracted from a team can do to the outcome of any giving game. The only difference is the changes in this case had nothing to do with subs; it was skaters migrating and