Tommy Gavin went to hang out with the Dublin Roller Girls and investigate the all female contact sport of Roller-Derby
We arrived late to the sports centre in Greystones, so things were already in full swing when we got there. The Dublin Roller Girls had a comfortable lead against the Liverpool Roller Birds, but with thirty minutes of Jams left to go, their eventual victory was not yet assured. We had come to see Roller Derby, the hard hitting alternative sport on rollerskates, where girls in fishnets glide around a track knocking each other around to the sounds of Blondie and Bikini Kill. We were not disappointed.
Points are scored when the designated team Jammer (marked with a star on their helmet), passes members of the opposing team (blockers). Blockers have to make space for their Jammer to pass the other team, and also prevent the enemy jammer from passing them. This takes place during Jams which last two minutes, and there are two half-hour blocks of Jams. Big hits are part of the game and injuries are not uncommon. Pads and helmets prevent the worst, but it’s still a contact sport on roller-skates. “I did break a couple of bones actually” explained Christine O’Connor aka Kitty Cadeaver, “but they were in my foot so I didn’t realise, and they were pretty much healed by the time I got an X-ray. We teach ourselves to fall so it doesn’t really happen, but it’s like any sport. You’re going to get fucked up”.
Kitty and a few others started what turned out to be the first Roller Derby team in Ireland in September 2009, after wanting to join a team and discovering that there wasn’t one. They met on boards.ie and decided to meet up in person every Sunday to get to it. “It took us about a month to realise how much we had ahead of us. We’d just talk about stuff like logos, team colours, team names, stuff we shouldn’t even have been thinking about. We were trying to come up with a league name, something that sounded cool, and we came up with the Dublin Roller Girls…”
The real work came in finding people who would want to join, finding a place to practice, getting equipment for people who didn’t want to invest immediately and inevitably, getting the money to pay for it all. Between surprisingly successful fundraisers and what little dues the initial few members were paying, the material side took care of itself, and training was able to start in January.
“We started doing stuff we learned on the internet because none of us knew how to skate properly. Videos, game footage, there is a lot of help out there if you want it. When we started doing practices, one of the girls was taking care of coaching, but she wasn’t getting to skate as much.” Enter Chris Goggins aka Violent Bob, Kitty’s boyfriend and the coach of the Dublin Roller Girls. “They just needed someone who would come in and roll with it” he said, pun unintended. “I decided to do it on skates too so it kind of meant that everyone was starting on the same level. Rather than standing there on my own two feet yelling about how simple things were, I was trying to learn them myself.”
The learning curve was and remains sharp for everyone involved. Kitty spends 34 hours a week on Derby related activities from training to administration, and the practice sessions are 10 hours a week for the serious players. Martina McDonald aka Tina Gutt-Herr-and Jamm (as in peanutbutter and jam) deals with the many press enquiries they get, which is part of one of the many committees the Dublin Roller Girls have assembled just to function properly. “Whenever you start training, the fresh-meat (beginner session) is on Sundays, and after you pass that, you go to Wednesdays as well. Then, after you pass that and become a senior girl, you go to Wednesdays, Sundays and Mondays. Then, after you pass that there are extra sessions on Sundays for the travel team.”
It sounds like a lot of work and is. “Some people take it up as a hobby, and I know a few girls who have managed to maintain it as a hobby. They come to skate, and they maybe come twice a week, go home and they’re happy. They’re not involved in the business side of the league, and that’s fine. But for people who can’t even commit to that, it’s just too much of a monster for them. The Derby Monster; it eats your life away. I wouldn’t see Bob if he didn’t come skate with us, it’s like a job.”
The Derby monster proved to be a consistent motif when I talked to the Dublin Roller Girls. Call it the cult of Roller Derby. The denizens of Skull Island had King Kong, Gozer had Zuul, and the Dublin Roller Girls have the Derby Monster, whom they willingly and unsparingly sacrifice to. It has disciples all over the world, as Violent Bob found. “There is a sense of community that you don’t really get with other sports. In soccer, maybe a coach wouldn’t help another because they want an edge or something, but with this it’s like, because it’s such an underground sport everybody wants to pull it up together. I’ve been down to help coach in Cork, we had the Galway and Limerick girls come down here to us. “
The sense of shared community and camaraderie ties into the subculture image aspect of the sport. Exactly which subculture varies from league to league. While it is primarily seen as being tied to rockabilly revival with tattooed women and hard partying, there are stronger elements of punk or metal in different places. The Dublin Roller Girls are more mainstream than some of the UK, and especially USA teams, and while there are girls with piercings and tattoos on the team, you could say they are more diverse in their alternative subcultures. “As long as I’m playing Derby, I don’t care if the girl next to me has tattoos or has never been to a rock bar in her life” said Kitty.” It does attract the subculture element because they see it’s a lot of fun, but they don’t necessarily see the hard work part and you lose them”.
Another motif beside the Derby Monster is the Whip It effect, named after 2009 Ellen Page film directed by Drew Barrymore about Roller Derby. The Dublin Roller Girls were involved in doing promo work with the production company that brought the film to Ireland, which was great for their PR, but the film also brought them a lot of girls who just wanted to be Ellen Page, and portended the biggest drop out of new recruits. Violent Bob had to fill the practices with stretches and isometric exercise, not deliberately to discourage, but in his words, “just to make sure the girls who were coming down realised that, yes, this is going to hurt and you’re going to wake up on Monday feeling stiff as a board.” It wasn’t until 6 months after the film came out, that new recruits started sticking around.
The Whip It effect tapped into Roller Derby’s on-going existential crisis between sports and entertainment. Obviously the image is built into the sport with the face-paint, alter-egos and fishnet tights, and when Roller Derby was revived in Texas in 2001, it was predominantly about entertainment. Dublin Roller Girl and Trinity Student Aine Ni Choisdealbha aka Peppy Nephrine told me that she wouldn’t want people to think that you just put on a pair of skates and skate around hitting people, as portrayed in Whip it. “There is a lot of strategy and a lot of effort, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing if people are initially drawn to it because of the image, because they might get drawn into the sport. There is a place for the image, if it isn’t necessarily about the image.” For Violent Bob, if someone can perform the skills and play the game, “then dress whatever the hell way you want to dress. For me, the sport always comes first. Always.
Between the entertaining aesthetic and the athletic aspect, Roller Derby has a lot going for it which accounts for the fact that it is growing every day. It’s also one of the few sports where the top competitors are women, and where the women’s leagues are seen as the legitimate incarnation.
There are around 100 girls on the waiting list for the next set of trials, and teams have sprung up in Limerick, Galway and Cork, independently of the Dublin Roller Girls. There is also now an Irish team who will be competing in Toronto in the Roller Derby world cup in December, six of whom are from the Dublin Roller Girls, coached by Violent Bob. Finances are still the biggest obstacle as the sport is DIY and built on the sheer enthusiasm of those involved. For it to continue to get bigger, it will eventually need some kind of sponsorship. For now though, the ultimate aim of the Dublin Roller Girls is to make it off the features pages, and onto the sports pages.
