Last night I was lucky enough to be able to co-train with one of my teammates. She is a vet who has been with the league since the beginning and captained my home team 4 out of the 6 years it has existed. Basically, she knows her shit and her practices are typically my favorites because I get a lot out of them. Last night, even though I was co-training, was no exception.
Our focus at practice was man-on-man aka offense. For some reason our league is all about the big D so we've been working to change that. We started off with a semi-tough warm-up, followed by 3 drills that focused on different parts of offensive pack movement: moving from the in or out of an opposing player and hitting them in the direction you just came from, movement within the pack to hit an opposing player anywhere in the pack, and distracting an opposing blocker to help your jammer. Then, we moved on to offensive pack scenarios, calisthenics, and stretching.
These were all drills we had done a million times in practice and so the goal was to not just go through the motions, but to think of each drill as if you are in a jam playing offense and not doing a drill. This is a mentality I have been trying really hard to sustain all the time and I wholeheartedly think it has made me a better skater. I don't just mean at practice, but at the gym too. When I'm slogging it out on the treadmill, I'm thinking, 'this is my speed lap'. When I am doing 3 minutes of death squats, I'm thinking about how I'm going to be immovable on the track.
Honestly, I see a lot of people calling it in at practice and that's fine I guess, but if you're there to get better and you aspire to have a pinky toes worth of Bonnie Thunders' skill, go to every practice like its the difference between being rostered in your next bout and warming the bench.
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