I was waiting for a bus for like an hour in the sweaty part of summer. It was around Sixteenth and Penn in Indianapolis and I was wearing a miniskirt with two toned tights and a black teeshirt…and checkered knee high socks…and gray New Balance…with a big bag and a sparkly green helmet. Toootaly blending in. A few guys came up and asked if I was a prostitute, no, cool, thanks for asking. A third guy approached but didn’t ask right away. What’s my name he asked…. “uhhh Buuuuuuuunnie? Yes, Bunnie, that is my name”…shit that makes it sound kind of worse. I looked down at my colorful outfit.

“Well, Buuuuuuuunnie where are your friends?” Then the bus came. And the whole ride I thought about that question. Then I wrote a metal song about it.

(Metal Voice)Fucking Teamwork. That’s what I’m fucking talking about. I’m talking about your fucking friends. You want some friends? Go to practice! They are fucking everywhere! Fucking friends! Fucking everywhere! Everywherrrrrrrr!!!

You have to imagine it with a double bass drum and it kind of speeds up at the end.

Then there’s hand claps, I made up a whole routine. But you know what I mean- no matter how badass another team’s jammer is, it’s a whole lot harder for her to pass two of us than just one. Together we can control her speed and position-and not just the jammer. We can control the whole pack- together.

And the only trick to teamwork is practice time. That’s the main ingredient. Plus you want a fucking friendly disposition. So spend time with your friends. When you spend time together on the track- and off it- you begin to learn each other, trust each other, and anticipate the next moves of one another.

When it’s hard, and it is, just remember you aren’t alone. You have a whole team full of people who are working towards the same goal. It’s easy to lose sight of the important shit when you focus on yourself. When you’re muscles are burning it’s easy to believe you alone are in your pain. Don’t forget about the girl next to you who came even though she has a blister covering the ball of her foot. She still came- to play with you. Derby is a very tough sport. It’s a rare chick (or dude) that will actually do it. So here we are, a bunch of rare chicks/dudes, playing the best sport on earth. Start to let a little of that rare-ness go at practice. Try to get that hive mentality.

You begin to see, this sport isn’t just about you. It’s about the one that held the jammer long enough for you to get to the front and help her out. The one who hit you hard when you first came back, and made you smile. The one that hipped you to that great deal at sock it to me . The one who loaned you her stickiest wheels…even though you’ve got a really bad reputation for losing things. We aren’t just friends between whistles, we are comrades. We are a team. It’s us against them. We fucking rock.

And that’s… fucking team work.