A three-time member of Team Canada roller derby put local and out-of-town junior players through a seven-hour bootcamp at Bienfait Memorial Arena on Friday.
“I’m putting them through a full day of exercises to introduce them to new ideas and concepts of playing the sport that they all love,” said Kim '8Mean Wheeler' MacKenzie halfway through the session. “We’re focusing a lot on agility, teamwork, some strategy (and) a little bit of contact.”
Lorelei Lachambre, coach of the Estevan Junior Coaler Rollers roller derby club, said 33 kids from Estevan, Brandon, Saskatoon, Regina and Rocanville attended the bootcamp. She said MacKenzie was scheduled to help run a camp in Regina over the weekend, so she approached the Regina Pile O’Bones roller derby club to set up an arrangement where the instructor could also spend a day in Bienfait.
“This is the only time that we’ve brought in a purely professional coach,” said Lachambre. “She played on Team Canada and she had lived, breathed (and) slept roller derby for 10 years. To have her here helping our kids is a pretty fantastic thing (where) they get to see that level of expertise.”
MacKenzie, who helped Team Canada bring home a silver medal at the Roller Derby World Cup in 2011, is the owner of Camp Pivotstar, a Vancouver-based roller derby school that travels across Canada, the U.S. and even into Europe to put on bootcamps for junior and adult players. She said the camp is catered to the skill level of its participants and is focused on adding to their foundation to give them and their coaches different concepts to work with.
“It’s like when you have kids and you tell your kid to do something 10 times and they don’t listen and a stranger comes in and tells your kid to do something and they listen,” she said. “I’m trying to reinforce things that other coaches have already taught them and build on it to show them the possibilities and maybe why they should listen.”
