Roller derby!

On April 10th, after checking out the Bellingham Saturday Market (see previous entry), Davina, Ben and I set off for the main attraction of our daytrip... roller derby! We'd been wanting to see roller derby for a while, so this was it - our first glimpse into the entertaining American subculture of derby girl attitude and roller skate violence.

The derby was held at the Whatcom Community College Gym, and was the second of the season's five bouts for the Bellingham Roller Betties. The bout was called "Attack of the 50 ft Derby Girl" (the purpose of which is probably just to provide a theme for the poster ads!).

Here's the crowd lining up outside the gym - everything from retired couples to punk chicks to young families...



Now might be a good time to describe roller derby. It is a contact team sport, played predominantly by women (and we saw an all-female league). It involves two teams of five skating around an oval track, with points scored as certain players (called "jammers", one from each team) manoeuvre their way through the "pack" and pass the members of the other team.

The game gets pretty rough because the pack consists of eight skaters, four from each team. Each player wants to help her team's jammer get through the pack and thus score points, while simultaneously hindering the other team's jammer from getting through. It's illegal to block someone using an elbow or foot... but body slamming and "booty blocking" are perfectly fine.

Each jam lasts only 2 minutes, and the lead jammer (the first one to get through the pack) can stop it earlier if she likes (eg. to prevent the other jammer from scoring any more points). There are two half hour sets, each consisting of as many jams as will fit into that time. And the clock doesn't stop between jams; the skaters get 20 seconds to line up again and the jam will start without them if they're not ready. Each team has more than five players though - they rotate on and off so no one has to skate constantly.

Click here to read more about the rules of roller derby.

Now for a little about the girls themselves. They all have scary-sounding "derby names", such as Eva Apocalypse, Helen Damnation, Malaria, and Lady Blackheart. Many of them show an inclination for expressing themselves via body art. In real life though - going by some of the profiles on their website - they are social workers, bakers, archaeology professors, shop assistants, number crunchers, students and mothers. These women are Tough with a capital T - derby is a full on contact sport. One woman broke her collarbone the day we were there. But the rest of the time they got right back up and kept on skating.

We saw four teams in total - the three teams that make up the Bellingham Roller Betties flat track roller derby league, and a visiting team. First up were F.L.A.S.H. versus the Death Rattle Rollers.

Team F.L.A.S.H. warming up...









Team Death Rattle Rollers warming up...







The umpires...



And... game on! The two jammers (signified by the stars on their helmets)...



Action on the track...







The sign for "lead jammer" (i.e. the first of the two jammers to make it through the pack) - umpire skating with left arm raised and right arm pointing towards the jammer...



An injured Bettie (a medical team waits on the sidelines for this - they were needed twice!)...



The announcers...





Roller derby security...



An earmuffed baby in the crowd...



And... halftime!

Now that you are crystal clear on the rules of roller derby, here is a compilation of the best videos we took (it goes on for a while - I couldn't condense it any further!). Enjoy!

In the second half of the event, we saw team Tough Love versus the Cog Blockers. Here are our best photos of those teams...





















At the end, we were treated to a display of people-jumping by one of the teams' coaches. On roller skates, he jumped five people, and then six people, and then seven people!

And that was roller derby - so fun and amusing that we hope to go again sometime! It might even be better than hockey...