Stuff keeps happening in the roller derby community. I have more posts in the works to discuss some recent sour-tasting events, but I wanted to start this blog on a more positive note. I think it'll help us deal with the other stuff.
There are currently seven roller derby leagues in Connecticut and Western Mass, and five of them have affiliated officials.
Over the past few months, I've come to realize that all of those officials, plus the unaffiliated officials in our area, are functionally one crew. We practice together, we call on each other first for staffing, we even carpool to away games.
I'd like to see us do more with this idea. We are one crew with five homes.
Collectively, there are probably 35–40 regulars, which is pretty impressive. On a good day, we can fully staff two games with no outside help, or three or four if there are visiting officials in the mix. That's big enough that it's tricky to extrapolate what that means on a day-to-day basis, really. I do know some things:
- We are not unanimous. People join and stay involved in roller derby for different reasons, and our expectation must always be that there will be differences of opinion. We are grownups, and can disagree politely while still maintaining professional collegiality. We do not establish "black lists" of officials or leagues, but we are free to share information about personal decisions to better inform our colleagues, and we are free to individually reach similar conclusions and present them jointly.
- We must also acknowledge that in any sufficiently large group, there will be interpersonal disagreements which make professional collegiality difficult enough to seem not worth the effort. The advantage of a large, distributed crew is that it will usually be possible to avoid situations where people who really can't work together are asked or expected to. As we get more organized we'll need to formalize some grievance processes.
- We have obligations to our home leagues. Area leagues can (and should) establish membership policies for officials, and an official who wishes to affiliate with a league must abide by their policies, including WFTDA or MRDA policies if applicable. We should spend some time as a crew refining our expectations of basic rights and responsibilities of officials in light of the participating leagues' currently established policies, and then encourage our leagues to stay within those guidelines when considering changes.
- We are better together than apart. As I say in my pregame meeting, officiating crews live and die on communication. We have a mailing list (Let me know if you're not already a member of area-officials@ctrollerderby.com); we can use Facebook or Google or Slack or whatever works. Here's my call to you, crewmates: start communicating!
Let's work together to make sure our rookies are trained up to the highest standards, to make sure our participating leagues have officiating coverage when they need it, to make sure that officiating roller derby stays safe and fun in Connecticut and Western Mass.
