Victorian Roller Derby League took a big win against the reigning champions Rose City Rollers at Big O 2017. I wanted to take a closer look at this interesting game between maybe the two biggest favorites to win the Hydra later on this year. More specifically, I’m going to be looking at what I think was one of the big reasons for Victorian winning this game: jam starts, mostly in the first period. Victorian pressured Rose in various ways on jam starts and Rose seemed to not have an answer. Even when Rose did get their own walls rolling, the jams started on Victorians terms. Rose weren’t able to amount much pressure on Victorian walls and they did not win any quick leads from jam starts.

A lot of this had to do with the jams in between jams. It has been a long running assumption that starting from the jammer line is better than starting from the front. This has been in transition for a while however. In this game, Victorian preferred to start from the pivot line. For the most part Rose were content with letting Victorian do this and start from the jammer line themselves. This continued even when things were starting to get a bit out of hand. The few times when Rose did contest the pivot line, Victorian lined up right behind them, then rolled back a couple of seconds before jam start, leaving a player to run offense. Here’s three examples of this:

Rose elected not to roll back with them, instead keeping the pack in the front with their wall. While this allows you to control the pack, I dislike this for a few reasons. First of all, positioning on the pivot line also allows for the opposing jammer to pick up speed. Second, when you’re stretching the pack and the opponent gets the lead, you have a looong way to get to your own jammer to play offense. This gives your opponent a much better chance to grab those big jams that win games. And maybe most importantly, you’re not taking advantage on the opportunity to pressure your opponent’s defense by positioning in front of them.

Rose did pressure on one occasion with a 3-2 blocker advantage winning a quick lead off of it:

For some reason Rose were mostly unwilling or unable to execute these types of starts when Victorian had an offensive player lined up against them. They did do a better job of rolling back to better catch the jammer as the game went along but weren’t able to get right on the Victorian walls to bring pressure while at it.

Victorian on the other hand did an excellent job at bringing pressure onto Rose just by starting right in front of Roses walls. This happened in various degrees throughout the game, but Victorians crushing 61-4 run from jam 14 to jam 20 highlights this well.

Limiting the brace resulted in a lot of leads for Victorian, but most often it was the triangle trapping the brace with another player playing offense from the jammer line. Here are 3 examples from those jams:

So what could Rose have done? The most important thing against these types of starts is to be able to have your blockers play behind the offense like they’re able to do here:

The dynamics of defense against jammerline offense are very interesting. Playing behind the defense is hard when the jammers jump at you immediately. Victorian did this very well. Rose also did made adjustments for the second half that I am very interested in discussing. Both of these topics will however have to wait for another post. A potential solution that I want to highlight here though, is what Victorian did. When they started from the back they challenged the pivot line and then did the roll out shown in the first gifs to make this a lot harder to do. You wouldn’t have to even do it all the way from the pivot line, just make sure you have some room between the jammer line and your wall to roll back and try to get that space just before jam start.

Success for Rose in jam starts this game meant just getting space for their own defense going. When Rose had one player running offense from the back, they mostly went for the bracing blockers. This was partially because you can’t really do offense on the blockers in the back, when they take on the jammer right next to your wall. Victorian had no problem playing around this like here:

Is this simplified and building a narrative? Absolutely. It takes a lot to turn those fast leads into the dual digit jams that Victorian scored, let alone into a victory. There’s a lot to be said about, for example Victorian jammers’ excellent forward lean, and ability to stay inbounds, as well as Victorian’s unique style of playing the triangle. Yet, I still think the jam starts and especially Roses lack of pressure on Victorian when starting from the back was a large contributing factor. Coming from a team that I feel has been a pioneer in aggressive jam starts, I found this surprising. This could also, to some extent, be about not wanting to show their hand too early on in the season, we’ll have to wait and see. Either way, it’s definitely early to count them out. Rose are known to bring it when it matters, and despite roster changes this year likely won’t be an exception.

Thank you for reading. I hope you share the post, if you found it interesting. I’d also like to hear some of your thoughts in the comments. I am also open to suggestions on topics you’d like to see discussed. I’ll be looking to make this into a regular thing, if people are interested in reading it.