Talking Derby to DNN: Joy Collision, Charm City Captain

By MercyLess, Last updated Sat Jul 18 2009 11:12pm

In the days after the Texas Rollergirls' top-ten marathon weekend, DNN's Mercy Less interviewed representatives of each participating team for their reflections on the bouts. In the third of four interviews, Mercy talks with Charm City captain Joy Collision.

DNN: How did you prepare your team for the bout against the Texecutioners?

Joy: I guess it's just constant preparation. We're playing so many games, hard to distinguish between preparing for just that game and any other game. We did look for some footage of Texas to see if we could, maybe, watch them and see how they played. But, we couldn't find any with their current roster, because they have a lot of newer transfer skaters this season. New people skating that haven't played so many games this year. We had to just try and work our strategy and get all of the players skills up to the level that we wanted, and work on our team play.

We did set up some scrimmages with the Harm City Homicide boys. We did know that Texas was basically a larger team than we are, so we thought that maybe getting hit by the boys and knocked around by them a little might help us prepare for getting knocked around by the Texas girls. They were, of course, really, really grateful because we haven't done so much stuff with them before. It's actually really fun, and hopefully we'll do that in the future. I think it helps both of us.

DNN: What was your feeling about your team's performance going into this game? What were your expectations?

Joy: I definitely feel like our team has been growing and getting so much better since the beginning of the season. It doesn't even look like the same team as when we first started playing in February. We have so many new girls that have really come into their own. I, of course, wanted to see us do well. I didn't, at the time, feel like we were assured a win against Texas in any way. But I didn't think it was out of our reach by any means. I feel like Texas is a wonderful team, and would've taken a loss as a victory. I still feel like it's a victory on our part, even though we didn't win that game. I feel like we played really, really well in that game, and I was satisfied. I was totally satisfied with our skaters, before and then after.

DNN: What was the most challenging part of that game for your team?

Joy: There's a couple of challenging things that happened during the game. One of which, is of course that some of our jammers that are normally in the jammer lineup weren't jamming. We definitely relied heavily upon people that we haven't had jam as much. They really pulled through, especially in the second period, for us. Bambi's Revenge, she's a newer jammer and she really came through for us in our second period. That was definitely a challenge that presented itself.

Right before the game we kind of knew we were going to have some issues with that. I hurt my knee, so I wasn't really going to be able to jam very much at all. We always had to make some adjustments during the game. They work really well together, and they are a very experienced team. Just the size of the girls and their knowledge of the game was the biggest challenge to us, I think.

The fact that it was at 11:00 am was challenging. We usually play our games at night, and we do practice in the morning, but after a long flight, it was definitely like, "Wow. I wouldn't mind sleeping in an extra hour." I'm sure they wouldn't have minded either. They had played Gotham Girls the night before. You have to do what you have to do.

DNN: I had asked Texas, so I'll ask you, too. What was it like to play that game without a crowd? Was playing to an empty room different?

Joy: Well, yeah, you can hear the other benches yelling. You can tell if someone's upset about a call, you can tell if people are ramped up and excited. There's just so much chatter from the other bench. Some of that gets drowned out by the crowd, by the music...it was different. I really don't mind. I think for leagues that don't have money to put on a bout or a production like that, it's a fine way to get a game going.

I'm sure there are some people on our team and on the Texas team that get amped up by having all those people yelling and actually play better in that kind of a situation. But then there's also people that it kind of freaks them out, and they have better games, without a crowd. It was interesting, but fun.

DNN: What was the best moment of this game for you personally?

Joy: I guess the best moment for me was being able to sit on the bench and watch my team play so well out there. I had a knee injury, and I tweaked my knee just this week, the week of the game, so I was pretty sad about that, because I didn't feel that I was going into the game at 100% at all. It was nerve-wracking for me being a team captain and one of the longest standing members on the team...I feel like there's some pressure, that maybe I put on myself to perform really well in these games to help our team out.

This game, because we have such a busy schedule, I was just like, "I'm going to sit myself down if I need to rest, and hope for the best," and I am always a nervous wreck watching the team. I was just so proud of everybody, even when I was sitting on the bench. I didn't need to be out there, our team has gotten so good, everybody's doing so well.

That, to me, was my favorite moment - to sit on the bench, and watch the girls play, and be so proud of them. To watch them do everything on their own, after coaching them for six months. everybody was doing what we talked about in practices. It was really wonderful.

DNN: What was the moment that made you exceptionally proud of your team, as captain?

Joy: I am proud of how everbody pulled it together in that game. Individually their skills were great. We were playing against this group of girls that have maybe been skating longer than us, and skating together longer than us, and I felt like we were really challenging them. It made me really proud.

DNN: What were the keys for Charm City's success in this game?

Joy: If you want to know an overview of the Charm City way, we're a team, we play a lot, we have tons of bouting experience. We don't have tons of bouting experience at tournaments or against top-tier teams. We started playing teams on our same skill level, and just now we started to play teams above our level. I think that has made us a second period team. We come in and we get a little shocked at, "Oh my god, these girls are so good and their strategy is so great."

What we do really, really well is adapt. We're like chameleons, we can go in there and see what they're doing, and change it up. I think that comes from us doing so much training with our skills. Not getting too bogged down with really pinpointing every little detail of our strategies. We have a general strategy and then we focus on skill a lot at practice. So if we need to change our strategy a little bit, we can, because we have that strong foundation of skills to back it up.

In addition to that, I fell like Charm Cty in general, we're not a "pretty" team. We don't have this flowing strategy, we look chaotic as shit when we're out there. I think that's part of our strength - we make other teams feel like they're in chaos, and we're a ble to thrive in chaos. I feel like other teams need the structure of their packs, and things like that. That's a skill, and one of our strengths - people can be flying all over the place and we can still somehow manage to pull a pack together.

DNN: What kind of talk was going on, on your bench, throughout the game?

Joy: We like to have a good time. We were being really positive. It was all good. We were just trying to check back in with everybody, checking in with individual skaters to see how they were feeling. I think everybody was generally feeling pretty alert for it being that early in the morning.

There was a period where we went without scoring for awhile, and that didn't even get us down. We were never like, "oh, man we're really down and out now." That's really never the talk we have on the bench. Even if we're losing, we don't ever feel like we're losing. I think we just put it our of our minds right away.

When we took some timeouts, we planned a lot better take our timeouts to stop the bleeding if things were getting a little out of control. We took them wisely. We really trusted in our bench managers, and appreciated how they were taking the time outs at appropriate times for us.

DNN: How did this game compare to your bout against Gotham?

Joy: Gotham was at home, I think that made a big difference. It was our floor surface that we were used to, and I think we were probably more nervous going into the Gotham game. We had never played at that tier of roller derby before. We played Carolina our first season, we played Windy City at [WFTDA East] Regionals last year, we played some other really great teams like Detroit and Boston, but we had never really played at that level. There's so much buzz around the Gotham Girls - definitely we were nervous about that game.

We weren't as nervous going into the Texas game, but once we got there, we were nervous! Just seeing some of the girls, and seeing that they were stong and big and had this real relaxed feel was kind of intimidating. I think the girls were like, "We gotta get over that now, we gotta play the, we can't go in there like that."

Now I feel like the nerves are all gone. Going into this Rat City game, even though Rat CIty is a super team too, I think everybody is done with being nervous, like, "Aw, bring it!" No more nerves for us, we're ready to go.

DNN: If you could give out 3 MVPs to anyone on Charm City for this game, who would they be, and why? On the Texecutioners?

Joy: I felt Lucille Brawl from Texas did such a good job jamming. Bloody Mary also did well too, but Lucille Brawl was a really squirrelly jammer, she's really hard to catch. I think she actually got the most points for her team in the game, too. She was definitely even more challenging than I had been expecting, she has great form and skills, and I was really impressed by her and how much she jammed.

I thought Desi Cration, who I have a derby crush on, was a really great blocker in the back of the pack. She's a really dedicated captain, and I just really admire her a lot. I think that she was a great skater, great attitude, good organization, she brought up really important points to the refs. She brought up a lot of stuff to the refs, and that was good for her team, and she was always really appropriate about it - a good captain, and great skater. I mean the whole team was good - there's no weak link on their team. Every next group of four girls going out there was so good, you're like "dammit", you know? There's no easy person to knock over, their whole team is really great.

On Charm City I really think it's Lady Quebeaum and Bambi['s Revenge] collectively, they would be considered jammers, but they haven't been jamming in the games as much recently. I was so happy for them to step it up to that level and be there for us when we needed them to be. I'd say Just Carol, myself, Flo [Shizzle] and Duchess [of Torque] are more our jammers, and they came in, and maybe haven't been training as hard as we have to do it. They were able to kick ass in there, I was so proud of them. Especially Bambi, it's one of her first travel games, this is her rookie travel team season, and she was bringing 5-0s on the Texecutioners! It was like, "where the hell did you come from?"

You can say that it's because she's my girlfriend, but Dolly [Rocket] doesn't ever get MVP awards from other teams, for whatever reason, she's oftentimes that really awesome skater that people think "she must get that MVP award all the time", but she really doesn't. She really deserves it. She's so good in there, and whenever she's in there the other team scores way less points. She is a great coach, she's a big reason we are the team that we are now. I would give her the MVP award, as well.

DNN: You came incredibly close to winning this game - what lessons are you taking away from this game?

Joy: Well, we'd like to try to be a first period team AND a second period team. Not being nervous - if we can hold our own against the Texecutioners, we can hold our own against anybody. Our second period against Gotham Girls, too - we came really close to them in the end, too. Why can't we just do that the first period? We have the skills to do it. Let's go out there and play our game - just do it from the get go, we have the jitters out now.

In addition to that, they [Texecutioners] work really, really well together. Their pack work, compared to a lot of the girls that we play in scrimmage around the East Coast, they have different coverage around the track, they do different things than we do here. It's gonna make our pack more holistic if we can take some of what they did -- the pack positioning, where they are, how they run their offense and defense. I think we'll take that with us, hopefully, it will make us a more well-rounded team.

DNN: What advice would you give teams in the lower ranks who hope to be as ambitious and successful as Charm City is this season?

Joy: I know there's been a lot of buzz about our season, that's great. I think for teams that want to be good - be ambitious. Go out there and book those games, even if you can't afford to put on a production, scrimmage people as much as possible. Just ask - there's somebody out there that wants to play. Play as many games as possible, as many scrimmages as possible.

Being consistent about your attendance is really good - having some standards for that kind of thing. We can't afford six practices a week or anything. We only have 3-4 practices a week, here. We expect that girls are gonna come, work 100% of the time while they're there, give 100% percent effort at the practice they do attend....means a lot.

If you want to move up in the rankings, a lot of it isn't necessarily a skills game. It's a planning thing. A really smart derby person told me once that if we pick our season correctly we'll move up in the rankings, and I think that it's true. You have to win some games, as well as play some teams that are challenging to you, to get well-rounded experience. Pick your teams wisely, so that you can learn the most from the games. Those hard fought games are where you're really gonna see where your team is.

Photos: Dave Hoffman, Bryan, Craig Lammes, Phil Peterson