Act 5: Roll On

Friday night I went to my first Roller Derby match.  Apparently the QCs have had a team since 2007 or so.  They clearly weren't doing much advertising before.  So far this year though, they've been in the newspaper, on my favorite morning show, and last year the movie Whip It was in theaters.  Let's face it, it probably increased interest.  I didn't even know what the sport really was before that.  And after watching it about 5 weeks ago, I was pretty sure I wasn't cut out for that kind of contact sport.  And I think I'm pretty tough!  Turns out I was wrong (about the first thing... I am obviously tough!), but more on that in a minute.

First off, pretty cute logo huh?  Sassy!

The Rollers play in a convention center downtown.  They use a flat track, not a banked track like in the movie.  Which means they don't really need a track at all.  They just taped off a track on the cement floor.  Clever.  The crowd sat in folding chairs surrounding the track.  I wish they would have had brought in bleachers as it was hard to sit down in anything but the front row and still see much.  It was impossible to get a front row seat though... the crowd was more substantial than I expected.  Very diverse and a little rowdy.  It was helped you get into it a bit.

The outfits the girl's wear are pretty crazy.  Mostly fishnets with fancy short shorts or frilly underwear underneath.  Heavy on the makeup too, particularly eyeliner.  They also have crazy nicknames like Bonezilla, Pink Taco, Busty Assault, and Lolli Gag.  This is at the top of my list for Halloween costumes this year!

The skating was kind of fun to watch.  It took me a while to catch on and understand the scoring.  Brief rundown for those of you who aren't familiar, but be warned I haven't read the actual rules or had them explained to me.  This is just what I was able to observe, so don't bet your life on them!  There are two 30 minute halves and there are 2 teams (I'm 100% on that one... go ahead and bet your life).  Maybe 4 or 5 players from each team are called blockers and the skate relatively slowly in a large mass, jostling for position.  Each team also has a jammer.  The jammer starts a ways behind and has to skate through the mass while the other team's blockers try to prevent them from getting through.  This is where the cutting people off, knocking people down, etc comes in.  The first jammer through and halfway-ish around the track is the lead jammer.  You know this because the referee points at them and makes an 'L' with his fingers.  Like the sign for Loser, but in this case it means Lead.  The lead jammer is the only person that can score.  She has to catch up to the blockers again and skate through.  I think she gets one point for each opposing team blocker she passes.  Make sense?  It's fuzzy for me too.

It was a much more tame game than I expected.  There were some falls but nothing crazy.  I personally thought they could have been more aggressive.  I'm sure the movies overdo it, which is my only basis, but I'd have pushed a couple of those girls around a bit more! 

It was a high scoring game (the other team scored over 100).  We ended up losing by quite a bit, but the team looked like they were having so much fun I hardly think it mattered to them or anyone else.


"It's not about how hard ya hit, it's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward."