Derby is a team sport, but I struggle with packwork. At home I can work on my core, agility and endurance, but it’s only at practice that I can practice being in a pack.
Packwork for me goes like this:
What am I doing!? Where is the jammer!? What team am I on!? What’s our tactic!?
Dammit, the jammer got through.
Rinse and repeat.
I get tangled in a net of confusion and I’m left feeling like a failure. I know other people feel like this, so here are some tips for drills and scrimmages that feel like one mistake after another:
- Make sure you understand what the drill is about and what you’re supposed to be gaining from it. It might be better to sit out the first few minutes to watch and make sure you know how its meant to go before jumping in.
- Take a break if you’re getting caught in a loop of doing things wrong. Stop, try and assess what has been going wrong, and pick one aspect to work on. Reaffirm it to yourself as you get back on track.
- Remember, no matter how you feel, you’re still learning. Remind yourself that everyone feels like this at one time or another and it’s okay.
Even when I do these things, sometimes I get home and I’m like, what even was that?
I do believe though, that failing is 90% of succeeding. So when I get home after a bad practice, I remind myself that all those failures are super important to my development.
To get the best out of failing, I try to analyse where I dropped the ball most of all.
Today I failed at:
not putting the brakes on when the jammer hit my wall
not moving my hips fast enough when the jammer changed points of attack
not keeping my forearms tucked in when I was juking through the scrum start
Additionally, it’s best to consider somethings that I did well to stay balanced. Today they were:
working on backwards one foot glides
using my hips to juke through the pack
using my edges to stop
Focusing on my failures is actually kind of good, because it allows me to see what I need to work on, rather than seeing the practice as two hours of suck. Finally, I pick something I failed at - today that is not putting the brakes on when the jammer hit my wall - and work on turning that into one of my successes next practice.
