I’m going to start this article with a crazy statement. Hold on to your helmets and mouth guards, folks:

The impenetrable wall as a strategy is dying, and Victoria — arguably the team who helped perfect it — helped deliver what will be its killing blow during WFTDA Championships in 2017.

Walls are dying, but not in the way you think

Now, before you get your torches and pitchforks, deep breath: Walls as a concept are not going to disappear from derby. Solid two- and three-walls can (and will still be) incredibly effective in trapping and destroy jammers for years to come. But strong, static walls are no longer an effective strategy if you want to win against a similarly-ranked elite team.

Why? Three reasons:

1. Roller derby players have learned how to skate. Really SKATE.

The skating skills on display from the top ten WFTDA teams are lightyears beyond what I first witnessed in person at champs in 2013, and they’re only going to improve as the derby xYouthCrewx ages up. 10+ years on skates playing this sport gives you access to an entirely different skill set than 1 or even 5 years of play. If you’re a stronger skater, you can execute more complicated strategies on track. Simple as that.

2. We’re learning how to coach the right skating skills.

As this sport has evolved, leagues across the world are better learning how to coach the right edgework and power skating skills to new skaters. Note that I’m not talking about derby strategy: I’m talking about learning the right skating skills that will best allow your league to execute said strategy. Better, more targeted drills lead to skaters being faster prepared for the top level of their league’s play (and beyond).

I’d wager that even now, very few leagues have coaches with significant (15+) years of skating experience under their belt. Having great coaches for skating skills and proper cross-training increases how effectively and quickly you can learn a skill, and leagues and the WFTDA have spent the last decade re-learning (and adapting from speed and hockey) how to coach these things.

3. We’re moving beyond “stay in formation” as a strategy.

As a direct result of reasons 1 + 2, skaters (and their coaches) have the freedom to experiment with more advanced strategies they may have shied away from previously.

In 2015, at the height of VRDL’s “whirlwhip” four-wall, very few teams even considered sending an offensive player off the start, for fear that their three-wall would never hold the opposing jammer long enough for offense to break up a strong four-wall. It took Rose using a “delayed three-wall” with two offensive players off the start to beat Gotham for other top teams to take notice.

In 2016, the top teams moved to three-walls as the standard, but few experimented with variations — save for Rose, Texas, and Victoria. Rose would eventually win against Gotham for the second year in a row by playing a smart penalty game and employing effective offense against a still defensive-heavy team.

In 2017, Victoria broke the wall playbook entirely by using two- and three-walls as catching formations rather than starting formations. Their 2 front, 2 back “wander start” threw Rose off its game, as the team never knew what grouping of blockers planned to play offense or defense until the whistle.

“But that’s such a risky move!” You might argue. “Victoria could only do that because of reasons 1 + 2, like you noted — no team without their level of skating could do it.”

Spoiler: That’s what people said about playing 3 on D and 1 on O in 2015. Now, pretty much every team from D3 on up is doing it.

In fact, teams in both WFTDA and MRDA have been experimenting with strategies using this technique (“Track Zoning”, or “Zone” for short) as early as 2013, and it works on all levels. Victoria’s victorious 2-and-2 start against Rose was being used in play by MRDA teams Mass Maelstrom and YMMD as early as 2014, and likely others, too — the beauty of playing a relatively young sport is that teams across the world are discovering with new strategies and ideas simultaneously.

But the origins of zone in derby go back far before 2014: They can be found as early as 2005–2006, when players were experimenting with smart positional blocking and holding lines. (The term “zone” itself is an homage to the much older basketball technique of the same name, itself reputedly invented by Frank Lindley.)

Zone is the future of roller derby (by reaching into its past)

To understand why track zoning or “zone” theory has become so prevalent, we have to take a quick and dirty time travel through roller derby history. (Emphasis on “quick and dirty.”)

In the early days of derby, players often followed the original WFTDA rules diagram when lining up and holding positions:

iPad recreation of the original rules diagram (not to scale).

As the game evolved, teams started figuring out how to slow down play with speed modulation: 2006 saw Providence Roller Derby (among others) experiment with wall-based positional blocking against then-powerhouses like Carolina. According to former PRD skater Corianne “Anna Wrecksya” Baker, “[Providence] made multiperson walls and used 1:1 positional defense” to shut down speedy jammers.

Strategies evolved from there, with teams further figuring out ways to connect their players without incurring multiplayer blocks. This led to an era of flat walls, early tripods, and guarding the inside/outside barriers:

iPad sketch of the knee-and-scrum start (not to scale).

Around 2011–2012, teams began breaking down horizontal space into more quantifiable positions:

iPad sketch of an inverted start with lanes (not to scale).

I first heard of “lanes” from Texas players Smarty Pants and Sarah “Killbox” Hipel in 2013, but the concept had been spreading worldwide as early as 2011. Lanes gave players new language for setting up on the track: Instead of walls covering arbitrary areas, players now had specific places they needed to hold.

But Texas in 2013 was doing more with lanes than most realized: They were also experimenting with positioning in vertical space.

An iPad sketch that uses lanes and vertical space to demonstrate one of the earliest examples I saw of zone: Texas’s “jammer hand-off” (not to scale).

When I first started posting gifs on Roller Derby Junkies (now RDJ.tv) in 2014, I focused a lot at first on Texas, and for good reason.

That year, while Victoria was learning how to perfect the whirlwhip four-wall that would define their team over the next two seasons, Texas was experimenting with out-of-the-ordinary two- and three-wall formations. They involved spinning, turning, off-set walls, and pushing, but most importantly: They used horizontal lanes and vertical zones to convince jammers to take certain paths.

Back then, I called it the “hand-off”:

Smarty (black pivot) demonstrating an ace “hand-off” variation on zone defense from 2013 (!) WFTDA championships. [Footage courtesy WFTDA.tv]

On runbacks, Texas would use a blocker in front of the jammer to force them to choose a side, then guide the jammer up that side to their waiting friend (or friends).

By 2017, Rose was using a variation of Texas’s handoff to handle the jammer with a two-wall (all while wasiting time on the penalty clock and freeing their blockers). Further explanation on Twitter. [Footage via Rose City Rollers]

The goal wasn’t to one-on-one block the jammer back out of bounds, like many players at the time were experimenting with, but to keep them trapped and predictable. If Texas could convince the opposing jammer that certain lanes of the track were the “best” lanes they could take, the team could then set up an appropriate catch to trap them and control them once more.

Texas blockers also used this to great effect to bait jammers into taking certain lanes on scoring passes:

Polly Gone (in black) baits the inside line and closes the door before the Atlanta jammer can grab her point, allowing her fellow Texies to escape. [Footage courtesy WFTDA.tv]

By putting players in certain lanes, Texas could effectively narrow the probability of a jammer taking certain areas of the track, and set up accordingly.



Rose used this technique to great effect during their first Hydra win against Gotham: By starting two on the inside line, two on the outside, they were able to catch Bonnie Thunders, play two on offense, then have the front offensive player guard the inside lane and rejoin the formation.

Rose (in rather-hard-to-see white) starts with two blockers in lanes 1 and 2 to provide offense off the start for Mutch, then sends one of those blockers up to the forward formation, all the while guarding lane 1/the inside line from the floating Gotham blocker. [Footage courtesy WFTDA.tv]

One year later, VRDL used a variation of this same strategy against Rose at 2016 WFTDA champs:

Victoria (in blue) uses one cap on either side, and uses their jammer’s positioning to choose which side played offense or defense. In retrospect, this is an early variation of their champs-winning start strategy — Swagger and Serelson (in 4 and 1, respectively) are lined up in the proper lanes, with Barrymore and Nuku taking their final-form two-wall in front of Rose’s defense, rather than lining up at the pivot line before pulling back. [Footage courtesy WFTDA.tv]

The “wander” start Victoria employed at champs took this a step further, by making Rose doubt where Victoria planned to set up a defensive wall. Would they really play two on offense at the back line and give Bonnie Thunders or Mutch speed to run up on a frontal two-wall? Or would they attempt to lock down the back wall and play offense from the front?

The answer, as we saw at WFTDA champs, was an mixture of both: When VRDL played offense at the back, it used a variation of Rose’s 2015 start; though both played offense, one of the two would guide the jammer up to the other two, then forming an impenetrable three-wall.

A very rough sketch of VRDL’s wander-start, with offense coming from the back (and dedicated offense from lane 1 back). Will update with a gif when the championship game is posted.

When VRDL played offense from the front, they pulled their front wall back to the formation and played smartly-timed O to break Rose’s formation.

A very rough sketch of VRDL’s wander-start, with offense coming from the front (and dedicated offense from lane 1 top). Will update with a gif when the championship game is posted.

In both situations, VRDL left an otherwise over-prepared team off their footing. And when you combine this tactic with routinely trapping Rose blockers in the box, it left the Portland team unable to send their own offense against VRDL’s strikes.

In short: Victoria zoned Rose off the start — a strategy Portland had itself employed against Gotham just two years earlier — and won the game because of it.

Just the beginning…

It’s probably easiest to observe zone defense and offense in context of jam starts and runbacks, since you have a longer period of time to watch players position themselves. But I actually find zone most effective during periods when you’re forced to play apart — for instance, when you’re being broken up by offense, or have to reform around an opposing wall:

2014-era VRDL (in blue) uses zone techniques to quickly reform a whirlwhip four-wall at the front after Philly (in black) attempts to crush the wall. [Footage courtesy WFTDA.tv]

You can also use this when playing offensive guard (the dedicated offensive player, who ideally also guards against escaping jammers or star passes), by blocking the one open lane:

Hannah Jennings for Rose (in purple) starts guarding lane 4 (outside), but moves to 1 to intercept the pivot from a potential pass. [Footage via Rose City Rollers]

Jennings for Rose (in purple), again, saves the inside line from a toestop-hopping Luna Negra. [Footage via Rose City Rollers]

Okay, so at this point I’m just demonstrating why Jennings is one of the best offensive guards in the game, but she’s underrated and it’s a great example of forward zone. Jennings (again in purple) is bridging for her pack, but stays active by guarding 3/4, where the 3 wall is weakest; when the wall moves to 3/4, she covers 1/2 to prevent Rat’s Luna Negra from accomplishing an inside line pull. [Footage via Rose City Rollers]

In short: Zone is a technique you can use in almost any situation in roller derby, and you’re going to start seeing a lot more of it as the game evolves to focus more on jam-by-jam strategies.

(Notably, I say technique, not strategy: You can build strategies around zone-based play, but your team simply being aware of track zoning won’t actually win you a game.)

TL;DR: Zone in a nutshell

When you “Play Zone”, you use the horizontal and vertical areas of the track as a team to trick opposing players into taking lanes you want them in. The main difference between zone and the various positional blocking strategies of years past? It’s what you’re doing on the track.

Zone is TRANSITIONAL PLAY: You work with your team to contain a player or play offense even if you’re not touching each other, and it isn’t meant to be a final blocking form. (You can block players, but it’s not meant to be a form you use forever.)

Positional blocking, in contrast, is a STATIC FORM: How you end up in on the track after performing a zone-based play. (i.e. tripod, two-wall)

You don’t need to be a top ten WFTDA player to learn effective zone play — you just need to be willing to trust your teammates to cover their zones in transition effectively. (And in all honesty: Practicing zone-based play will help newer skaters reform tighter and more effective tripods in moments of chaos, because they’ll have a technique to fall back on if they get lost.)

Want more info on zone-based play? You can find a great primer drill on getting used to zones on RDJ.tv, an example practice plan, and more to come later this month.

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