As a creative with an office job, I live a very stationary lifestyle. It can be a struggle to find reasons to move, especially when so many of the regular moving techniques like running are boring. I decided, partially based on nostalgia for elementary school roller skating parties, to take up roller skating! Being a grown adult at a roller rink can be a bit of a trial as the primary attendees of roller rinks are families of young children hosting birthday parties.
Unless, of course, you meet the Derby Girls.
I hadn’t heard of roller derby until I watched the 2009 film Whip It starring Elliot Page. It is a fantastic coming of age film about a young girl from a very upright suburban community with firm expectations who secretly joins a roller derby team. Through derby she learns a lot about life: what she wants, how to stand up for herself, and how to say no to her mother’s expectations of her all thanks to this feral sport on wheels.
After watching that movie, my trips to the roller rink became very attentive, looking for any sign that there might be a team here in my small town. By my sheer blessed stars there was, and they even offered open practices. I had no idea what I was doing, but I showed up, no skates and a bicycle helmet in hand.
I was in for a hard and fantastic lesson.
Roller derby is a rowdy, full contact sport. Two teams play on the track, each with four blockers and one jammer to score points. The jammer’s goal is to pass as many members of the other team as possible and the pack’s goal is to help their jammer and keep the other team’s jammer from getting through. Simple enough premise but so many ways to execute on the track: Some jammers are tiny and can go so fast or just slip around the blockers. Some jammers are huge and simply can’t be blocked. Blockers can form structures with their bodies to trap jammers, push them out of bounds with a perfectly timed hip check, or dedicate themselves to bothering the other team’s blockers so their jammer can skate through. There’s a lot of different techniques, but the key is that the team is communicating and listening to work together.
If you know anything about derby though you probably know it by its reputation. It’s a game of women in fishnets, glitter, and eyeliner with aggressive pun nicknames beating the crap out of each other while on wheels. This is not entirely incorrect! When a friend asked me, “What’s the difference between a derby name and a drag name?” I said, “Derby names tend to be more violence based.” A bout I recently spectated featured such players as Slamwise Gamgee, Violet Tendencies, Scary Magdalene, Kim Kong, and Knight of Slamalot.
Derby as we know it evolved from old rollerskating races that started during the depression as pure entertainment. There was only a vague enough sense of teams and rules so an audience could have something to latch on to. Falls from skaters were exaggerated. Players would get into fights, knock each other down, and get pulled off the track by officials. It was all about the spectacle, down to the names and costumes. Rivalries would “develop” between teams, much in the way they do in wrestling with “good” guys and “bad” guys. It’s only been in the most recent few decades that the sport properly became regulated with required safety gear. This doesn’t stop players from being in full faces of makeup and non-obtrusive costumes on the track, of course. The theatrical roots of the game will never go out of style.
Derby is also a sport that’s famously been very inclusive. It’s primarily played by women, but there are teams that are co-ed. Even when the sport was still in its more show-boat era, the rules for male and female teams were the same, something which isn’t true for most dual league sports. The famous phrase people will use is “derby is for every body,” and meaning it quite literally. People of all ages and sizes can truly thrive with the game as there’s so many different ways to play it. When I went to my first practice I anticipated a lot of twenty-somethings like myself but found myself being instructed and encouraged by mostly folks in their thirties and forties, all so much better on skates than I was.
The first thing they teach you in derby training is falling and boy did I fall a lot. Every time someone fell the whole team would cheer and clap. The team captain told me they do that because no one should feel ashamed when you fall. Falling is just part of the gig, something even the most advanced players did. The trick is to fall safely and get back up. It was that simple: If you were willing to learn and get back up, there was a whole team there to help you.
I have yet to really play derby myself. Between school and life and all sorts of other chaos I didn’t have the time then to commit to practices, but derby has never left my mind. I still think back to the movie Whip It sometimes, when that timid young girl tells the derby team they’re her new heroes. They look at her and say “Put some skates on, be your own hero.”
I’m happy to say I’ve signed up for more training. I don’t know if I’ll ever properly play and I definitely know that I am going to fall a lot—on and off the track. But I am going to keep getting back up, I am going to keep learning, and I am going to keep communicating with my team to get through anything.
Sam is unsure what exact words describe them best: Lunatic has been used, Gothic Romantic is apt, and Big ol’ Nerd is reductive but true. Mostly they just like stories in whatever form stories can be found. Sam specializes in Frankenstein, running “The Uncanny Productions” on YouTube, but they also dabble with podcasts, singing, and theatre as well. They have a DVD collection that’s long outgrown its shelf, a coffin they use as a desk, and an unrelenting joy for things that are spooky, ridiculous, or magical.
