Hello and welcome to my blog! I don't have much experience under my belt, but I'll post what I know. First...a little about our league...
Our league was founded in 2010 by a very dear friend who recruited my husband as a member of his board of directors. Originally I had no interest in skating at all! I could not imagine myself participating in roller derby! I was an overweight mother of 5 (2 of my own and 3 step-children) who had never really had any interest in sports. I just thought it would be cool to watch! For the first few months my dear husband would work third shift, come home and shower, work on "derby stuff", go to meetings, sleep for about 3 hours and start all over. I couldn't understand what the big deal was and why he was literally killing himself for this thing called roller derby!
And then.....it started....
I was asked to join them. I had no idea what I was getting myself into or what I could offer. All I knew was I would get my husband back...and quite frankly thats all I really wanted. Little did I know how much derby would change my life!
When we started our journey, we were known as RiverCity Roller Girls, Peoria Illinois. As things progressed, we soon noticed all of our skaters were from Fulton County, not Peoria County so we made a decision to move our focus from the city to small town USA. It has been the best decision we made in the early days of our league!
We recruited our friends, family and siblings to get involved and skate with us. What we found was so drasticly different from the city girls and the farm girls were, those farm girls could skate! Don't get me wrong...the city girls could skate too. But those girls from small towns were skaters! They'd been skating every weekend since they could tie their shoes. And they had heart! The knew we were just getting started and had nothing to offer them, but still they wanted to skate for us. So we set a date for our very first practice and when that day got here we were so nervous, excited, and scared. We had no idea what would happen...but something was about to!
Since that first practice in January, we've lost skaters due to various reasons, (jobs, injuries, lack of motivation, etc.) we've gained more great skaters, coaches and NSO's. We've undergone a name change and are now called Spoon River Speed Demons, and most recently we've joined USARS. Though we are not ready to compete yet we have learned so much in the last 5 months about derby, but more importantly about ourselves. I think what we've learned most is never give up!!
I saw your link on the skatelog page for sharing the blog, so I thought I would follow you here.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to check my blog: http://www.engel-engel-engel.blogspot.com/
And i feel you when you say you had no idea how it would change your life. i said something like this on my blog as well, because i too was clueless about how much i would get envolved in it, and always want more.
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