A World Without Minor Penalties?

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!

WFTDA is testing out not implementing minor penalties in bouts.

I do think this is a good idea to keep the bout going and have less official time outs that last five, ten, fifteen minutes or more. These timeouts make a LOT of the crowd antsy and some even leave.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the need for rules for the players' safety...like hitting outside of the "good touch" zones. A hard hit to the forehead from an elbow could potentially leave the recipient of such a hit in a vegetative state being fed through an IV and basically being reverted back to an infant-like state. Maybe that sounds a lot better than having to be out in the real world, go to work, take care of kids and pets, wipe your own ass, and make mortgage payments...but you wouldn't be able to play derby and that would not be cool. Not at all.

There has been a lot of noise in the derby world for a while now about all of the rules WFTDA puts out and how complex they can be. Many believe it slows the game down and that the subjectivity of what constitutes a minor penalty by various refs makes it difficult to know from bout to bout what constitutes a major or a minor.

Obviously if a jammer slams into your back and knocks you over, that is a MAJOR back block. But what if a smaller jammer, like Pocket Panda from D3's Crash Test Dolls (who stands about 3 feet tall) slams, full-bore into the back of a much larger stature of a player like Old Capital City Roller Girls player Bat R Up from Iowa City (who is about 7 feet tall) At first one might say, well obviously Panda would just take Bat's knees out from under her and incur a low block. Not necessarily so. Bat likely won't move. So that means Panda won't get a major, or even a minor. But that also depends on the referee's view of what happened and understanding of the rule. And that's just one of many, many scenarios in which the difference between a major and minor are subjective.

Then there's the delaying of game for official timeouts. If a penalty tracker, wrangler, whiteboard NSO, etc was not able to let the ref know that a player had 4 minors before the jam is over and that player is off the track, then a timeout has to be called. If there is a discrepancy between the refs and NSO's about how many minors a player has or if they served a major based on four minors or a major for a major call, then the whole world ceases to rotate and oh my gawd please don't cross the streams!

So what about the jammers? How ticked off would you be if the jammer got by with a MINOR CUT? Every single time? With no penalties. At all. None. The ONE person who can score points for the the team can get by with going one foot outside of the track and will get no sin bin time for it.

Go back to the Panda vs. Bat situation. If Bat was jammer and Panda was the blocker, Bat would take Panda out if she ran into the back of her. So where's the happy medium here? This is where minors come in handy, to discourage Bat from running into Panda and killing her. Or maiming her into the vegetative state discussed above.

Poor, Panda.