Move on up

MRD have been skating a long and bumpy road lately. It's not cool to moan, but as any fledgling team, group or organisation will know, often the way that things begin is not the way they can continue.  Sometimes introducing any sort of change can be the biggest challenge of all.

Bearing this in mind there has been a LOT of change in the MRD camp this year. As the club began to grow the members of MRD expressed a desire for decision-making to be more democratic and fair. We ran polls, allowing people to nominate themselves for project manager positions within the club (e.g. Treasurer, PR, Bouts manager... to name but a few) and we also voted in an overall president of the club.

We recently voted on whether we should move training venues, from The Arcadia in Levenshulme to The Sporting Edge in Openshaw. It was a difficult decision as the club was founded at The Arcadia, but 87% of the votes were in favour of the move and it meant we could have our own space in an already fully-functional environment whilst remaining centrally located. So we're now settling into our new venue!

We remain as inclusive as we have always been but we are currently putting in place ways to make skating with MRD safer, fairer and more encouraging for skaters both new and old. Setting up a junior roller derby club requires skaters and coaches to be safeguarded, whatever their age. This is something we're looking to set up with help from the owners of Sporting Edge. We're also fine-tuning our training sessions to make sure they fully cater to the needs of all ability levels - there'll be an announcement soon about our next run of the Mega Heroes 12-week course for new skaters.

Our future bouts have now been planned up until the end of 2012, meaning we will soon have an actual bouts calendar for everyone to plan their weekends around :P On top of all this and more, we are trying to get a brand spanking new website designed and up and running! The current website was knocked up in under two weeks to promote our first bout Wonderbrawl and has been long overdue a re-design. We now also have a fantastic sponsor in the form of Extreme Largeness and an official team photographer in the ever lovely Shirlaine Forrest. So much work is going on behind the scenes it is unreal!

The main aim of all this hard work is for us to be more organised, fairer and stronger than ever before - and although it has been a tough road so far I reckon we can pull it off. We *are* MRD after all.

Derby love to you all - it's our love of this mad sport that keeps us trying to make MRD the best it can be.
- Kate Push

"Action and reaction, ebb and flow, trial and error, change - this is the rhythm of living. Out of our over-confidence, fear; out of our fear, clearer vision, fresh hope. And out of hope, progress." - Bruce Barton

Copyright - Shirlaine Forrest