he women wear helmets, mouth guards, knee and elbow pads, and wrist guards. They skate around a rink, pushing each other, hip checking, and hitting opponents’ shoulders, chests, and thighs. Bruises, rink rash, and broken ankles are not uncommon.
This may sound like hockey except for one thing — the women are wearing fishnet stockings, pleated miniskirts, and spandex shorts so short they could double as bikini bottoms. And there is no ice anywhere to be seen.
This is the sport of female flat track roller derby, which has made a comeback across the nation over the past 10 years and locally since 2006. Many might think of women’s roller derby as a form of staged televised entertainment from the 1980s along the same lines as World Wide Wrestling or American Gladiator. But since its revival, roller derby has returned as a serious competitive sport, complete with strict rules and an international governing body. And now a group of North Shore women have formed the area’s first roller derby team and a new league to unite the other teams in the region.
Roller derby, which dates back to the 1930s, became popular in the 1940s when it was first televised, but eventually fell by the wayside in the 1990s. It was brought back to life in the early 2000s by the Texas Rollergirls. In 2004, the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association was formed to oversee the sport, and by 2010 there were more than 450 flat track roller derby leagues worldwide. The sport is even under consideration for the 2020 Summer Olympics.
Roller derby is played with five women on a team who skate in a counterclockwise direction on a flat oval track (as opposed to the banked tracks popular in the ’70s and ’80s). Each team has a pack of four blockers and one jammer, who is identified by a star on her helmet. Points are scored every time the jammer passes a blocker from the other team. The goal is to block the opposing jammer by pushing her out of bounds, forming a wall in front of her, or knocking her down, while at the same time helping to get your own jammer through. The games, which are called bouts, are comprised of two 30-minute halves, which in turn have two-minute jams, or plays. As in hockey, the sport requires quick bursts of energy and short plays, and new players are rotated in with each jam.
“It definitely takes some endurance,” said Aleata Quinn, a seamstress who lives in Tahoe Vista and had been playing with the Tahoe Derby Dames in South Lake for the past year.
Quinn stresses that despite the frilly uniforms, roller derby is not for the fainthearted. It is a full contact sport. The WFTDA’s tagline is: “Real. Strong. Athletic. Revolutionary.”
“We try to balance between the short shorts and fishnets, and being a real sport,” said Quinn, who notes that some of the more established teams are moving away from feminine outfits to more sports-like pants and jerseys. “We want you to be cute and girly, but we want to be taken seriously as athletes.”
Quinn, 26, discovered roller derby when a friend who played for the Central Coast Roller Derby League in San Luis Obispo told her about the sport. Even though Quinn had never been into competitive sports and only casually skated as a kid, she was intrigued.
After her first practice with the Tahoe Derby Dames, Quinn was hooked.
“It is one of the only full contact sports geared toward women,” said Quinn. “There’s nothing else like it for women. It’s a team sport, which is different than what’s around here.”
Roller derby attracts skating and sports novices like Quinn, who are looking for something new, and others who want to continue to play competitive sports and skate. Christine Bettera, who lives in Kings Beach, played competitive softball and volleyball her whole life and grew up roller-skating. She began playing with the Tahoe Derby Dames when the team started in 2008 and fell in love with the sport for its athleticism.
“I’ve seen so many women find their inner strength through roller derby because some in their day-to-day lives never knew they could do something so awesome,” said Bettera, 31, a former vet tech turned personal trainer.
For years, Quinn and Bettera and three to six other women from North Tahoe would make the hour drive to South Lake Tahoe twice a week to play with the Tahoe Derby Dames, whose home rink is an old concrete basketball court in Bijou Community Park. But when Quinn would try to recruit other women to play, she often got the same response — South Lake is too far.
“I’d be out meeting people and tell them I play roller derby, and the women would say they’d love to do that, but they are not going to drive one hour each way twice a week,” she said.
So Quinn and Bettera, along with three others in their carpooling group, finally decided this spring that it was time to start their own team on the North Shore. They formed the Ladies of the Lake, which currently has 12 members and is looking for more (there are typically 14 women on a team). They also created a new league, Sierra Regional Roller Derby, to bring together the other area teams — Tahoe Derby Dames, the Carson Victory Rollers, and Reno’s Battle Born Derby Demons, which was started in 2006 and is the longest running of all the teams.
The one thing that the Ladies of the Lake don’t have, however, is a home rink. The team holds an open skate and recruitment night at Northstar every Tuesday and street skates around town. Two days a week, they take off their skates and train at the North Tahoe Regional Park in Tahoe Vista, where they practice plays and strategies on their feet (known as shoe derby.) But the team would really like its own track. Flat track rinks don’t have to be real roller skating rinks; they can be any flat, smooth service that fits the dimensions of a track — at least 10,000 square feet is required. Many teams use warehouses or gyms and mark off the track with tape or rope. Bettera said the team is talking with local rec departments about possibilities.
In the meantime, the Ladies of the Lake scrimmage with the Carson Valley Rollers every Wednesday and will have its first out-of-town scrimmage on July 12 in Sacramento against the Donna Party. The team is also starting up a recruitment night at the Mellow Fellow in Crystal Bay.
“We’re starting the team really because of the women and girls of the North Shore,” said Bettera. “There are a ton of athletes here. I don’t see why we can’t bring the sport here and be successful.”
For more information about Sierra Regional Roller Derby and Ladies of the Lake, visit facebook.com/sierraregionalrollerderby, sierraregionalrollerderby@gmail.com. Comment on this story below.
