Spending Time with Sin City Roller Derby

Front and center: Cherry Jane, behind her is Chingina Get You waiving to photographer, Benjamin Fields.

By Victoria Koelkebeck

I sat at the kitchen table, laced my roller skates and searched ‘basic roller derby skills’ on YouTube. I’ve been on skates a handful of times and I ski pretty often. How hard could it be?

I watched about three videos before I decided that I was 100 percent not prepared to do anything remotely close to playing roller derby.

When Devoid Magazine started, the first story that made my future article list was ‘roller derby,’ and I dreamed of joining a league to get a glimpse of a culture most people have never experienced. Usually, when I mentioned my story idea in conversation, I was met with, “I didn’t know we even had a roller derby league here.”

Well, we do. To my knowledge, Las Vegas is home to two women’s roller derby leagues, Sin City Roller Derby (SCRD) and the Las Vegas High Rollers. The High Rollers are a banked track team and SCRD is a flat track roller derby league. And before you say, “Oh, flat track derby isn’t as cool as banked track roller derby,” check yourself.

In the early 2000’s, the Texas Rollergirls created flat track roller derby and a more accessible sport for all. With the creation of flat track roller derby, they had “the ability to mark track boundaries on a skating rink floor or any venue with a flat surface large enough to fit a track,” as opposed to building and storing a large banked track. This tweak to the sport “made it possible to play the game just about anywhere,” according to the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA).

Flat track roller derby leagues started to spread all over the country. The game went to California, Arizona and eventually brought the game to fabulous Las Vegas in the early aughts.

And 19 years later, on a blazing summer day, I built up the courage to go to a roller derby Boot Camp hosted by SCRD.

When I arrived at Flamingo Skate Park that day, there were a ton of people getting their skates on, and several of the SCRD members were rolling around to see if anyone needed to borrow gear for the Boot Camp.

I thought, I guess people didn’t read the part about bringing gear, and I felt proud of myself for being prepared with my K2 pad kit fresh from Big 5. As I was sliding my knee pads on, I caught the eye of a league skater who goes by “Furious Fuschia.”

It should be noted that league players of SCRD are referred to exclusively by their derby names and that calling someone by their government name is considered taboo. Derby names are usually funny, campy and a little intimidating. According to Big Daddy Voodoo’s Guide to Finding The Right Derby Name, “A skater's name should be relevant to their real life, their interests, and their personality. It should be a very personal thing that feels absolutely right. I consider a name right if, after a couple months, no one remembers their real name.”

If you graduate from Fresh Meat, aka the intro to the SCRD league, you get to pick a derby name and number. But I don’t think I could confidently give you more than five of the league skater’s government names because I don’t actually know what they are.

So Fuschia stopped beside me and glanced at my knee pads. “Are those the only pads you have?” she asked. I smiled. “Ummm.Yeah?” Then she yelled to Rebel Lynn. “Can you grab some extra knee pads?” Moments later, Rebel slid a pair of pads over my shoulder that were about three times the size of the pads I brought. “Thank you,” I said sheepishly.

Once we were all geared up, Malice Aforethought introduced herself. She was running the Boot Camp for the day and gave a demonstration of the skate skills we would need to know in order to try out for the Fall Fresh Meat group.

Ghoullie at the Fresh Meat VS Old Beef Scrimmage. Photo Courtesy of Benjamin Fields.

I didn’t know any of the skills she demonstrated. Fuck, I thought. I got in line with the other skaters and attempted each skill, falling often and for what felt like forever since my knees were barely bent. “Get lower,” skaters yelled to me from the sidelines. I kept smiling. But then I fell again and felt like a giraffe flying through the air. I was ready to be embarrassed, but then people started clapping for me. They yelled things like, “Good job picking a cheek,” and “Good fall!” and I felt the fear of looking like an asshat just wash away. Instead, I was like, hell yeah, I did choose a cheek, and I got back up to attempt the next skill.

When I got home, everything hurt, and I realized none of my gear was suitable for roller derby. The next day I went to Death Drop to buy new skates and knee pads. I would’ve bought elbow pads too, but I ran out of money. It was there that I met Inglorious Basher who co-owns the store with Hellvira. She helped me find a pair of non-heeled Reidell quads — the classic starter derby skates. When I put them on, to my surprise, she said, “Well you’re not a complete Bambi,” a term I learned later was meant to describe the wobbly first steps of a brand new skater.

I walked out of Death Drop about $300 poorer, but when I put those skates on for tryouts, there was an immediate change in how I skated. The improvement didn’t last long though; as I was promptly humbled by the next set of drills. During tryouts, we got to do each skate skill three times in front of the SCRD coaches. I could tell I was not doing well, but I was there, doing my best and smiling a bunch.

By some witchcraft, a clerical error, or maybe just the roller derby goddesses smiling upon me, Malice invited me to attend the first month of Fresh Meat.

For the first few weeks, I was miserable at practice. I sucked at everything. Every single drill was a public embarrassment and my tailbone was bruised from falling all the time. And then around the fourth week, I went to practice and it wasn’t that bad. And then I went again and I actually had fun because I was getting better at skating. Who knew, right? You keep practicing something and eventually, you stop sucking at it.

“Who knew chicks that want to hit each other for fun are the sweetest ones?”

All struggles with skating aside, the team has some of the nicest people I’ve met in Vegas to date. They kept me going through the first painful weeks of derby. Within minutes of arriving that first day at Flamingo Park, I was chatting with other skaters trying out for Fresh Meat. By the end of the day, a skater named Sunny Martinez added me to a roller derby group chat — a chat that is full of support for one another and helping Sunny solve debates with her wife about Taylor Swift songs.

Even though I was arguably the worst skater in the chat, the team was reassuring. They kept telling me that I was improving and offering to have skate dates together to practice.

All the people in the Fresh Meat group this fall have been kind, ready to offer help if you need it, and always ready to pick you up — even if they’re the one that put you on the ground in the first place. “Who knew chicks that want to hit each other for fun are the sweetest ones?” Allyssa Grant said, one of my fellow Fresh Meat skaters.

People do this crazy-difficult sport mainly because it’s badass. But it’s also a fun way to exercise and make friends. As an adult, it can be difficult to meet people. Enter trauma-bonding.

Through the shared experience of fighting for your life to either get through or block other skaters, roller derby yields some of the greatest friendships. Some even go as far as “marrying” their friends in a mass-wedding ceremony after RollerCon.

Saying “I Do” to a Derby Wife

The wedding tradition and practice of cuffing a “derby wife” started in November 2003 after RollerCon. Thanks to the Vegas culture of quickie weddings, this beautiful display of friendship was born.

In 2006, Journalist for Las Vegas City Weekly, Joshua Longobardy, described his experience at the RollerCon mass wedding. “At midnight on Saturday, July 29, I watched them consecrate these interstate friendships in a massive matrimonial ceremony held under a toenail moon. Derby marriages, they called them. Girls vowed their eternal friendship and lifelong fidelity to one another, in front of the Hogs & Heifers Saloon Downtown, and then commenced the honeymoon in the biker's bar without delay,” he wrote.

And today, the tradition is still very much alive.

Paying Your Concrete Taxes

But despite the derby weddings, supportive community and thrill of the sport, roller derby is not all sunshine and rainbow hair. The truth is the road to being a badass is paved by eating shit. It’s part of what Mercy would describe as “paying your concrete taxes.” Mercy is “a firm believer that if you aren’t falling, you aren’t learning.” In all of the SCRD leagues from Littles to the A-Team, falling is as normal as breathing.

There is so much falling happening in roller derby that during the Battle for the Coast tournament in California, I tried to keep track of how many wipeouts I saw during one game. I quickly lost count after about 20 spills. This was the same tournament where I overheard Elliot Rage say they took a “wheel to the asshole” in one bout and came back to the bench laughing about it. Contact, falling and hurting oneself is all part of the sport, but Mercy advises that new skaters should “learn to be okay with falling — and practice falling safely.”

Hellvira paying “concrete taxes” but receiving some help back up from an opposing team member. Photo courtesy of Benjamin Fields.

Playing Roller Derby: The Basics

Roller Derby has what the New York Times describes as “a long and surprising history,” although for many, the sport entered the zeitgeist when the movie Whip It came out in theaters in 2009. In reality, the sport “was born on Aug. 13, 1935 at the Chicago Coliseum,” according to Journalist, Jennifer Harlan. Event Promoter, Leo Seltzer, was seeking something thrilling for Depression-era crowds after reading that “more than 90 percent of Americans had roller skated at some point in their lives,” wrote Jennifer.

The sport started as a team of two people: one man and one woman who skated 57,000 laps on a flat track imitating a cross country trip from the east to west coast. Whichever team finished roughly 2,700 miles won. If that sounds a bit dull to you, that’s exactly what Leo Seltzer was thinking. Although the first Transcontinental Derby drew in a crowd of 20,000 people, Seltzer worried that “the endless laps would get, well, repetitive.” In collaboration with sportswriter David Runyon, they created “what would become the enduring structure of roller derby and introduced the full-contact thrills that define the sport today,” Jennifer wrote.

Flat Track Roller derby is played in periods called “Jams.” During a Jam, each team fields up to five skaters. Four of these Skaters are called “Blockers” and one is called a “Jammer.”

The Jammer wears a helmet cover with a star on it. The two Jammers from each team start each Jam behind the “Pack,” aka the group of the Blockers, and score a point for every opposing Blocker they lap.

Because Jammers start behind the Pack, they must get through the Pack, then all the way around the track to start being eligible to score points on opposing Blockers. The team with the most points at the end of two 30 minute halves wins, according to WFTDA.

What Are The Rules?!

But there’s about a zillion rules I left out of that summary — rules skaters try to learn while being a Non-Skating official, or NSO. As part of the credit to graduate Fresh Meat and join the league, skaters are required to serve seven NSO shifts.

According to WFTDA, the roles of an NSO are:

Head NSO: Leads the team of NSO’s
Penalty Box Timer: Responsible for timing penalties
Penalty Box Manager: Leads PBT’s
Jam Timer: Time’s jam time played by the skaters
Scorekeeper: Keeps score for one team

Speaking from my own experience, the first NSO shift is a blur of stress and ear-splitting whistles as you try to navigate the layered facets of the game and help a much more experienced team of Non-Skating and Skating Officials to keep score and time penalties.

Being an NSO does help to learn the rules, but even more seasoned skaters like Pain Gretzky say the hardest skill to learn in roller derby would be the “Rules…rules…rules. LOL. It’s a never-ending learning process.” And she’s been with SCRD for a full year now.

There’s some debate on how many officials are needed in order to host a sanctioned roller derby game. Some sources say ten, some say up to twenty. But let’s go with ten — that is a lot of officials. On average, it’s three more officials than a football game, five more than a soccer game, and six more than a baseball or basketball game.

What’s even crazier is that these officials, more often than not, are unpaid volunteers. One of the SCRD NSO’s, Random Exxtra, has been working with the league for years. During his 10-hour workday, he loads furniture in and out of trailers, then comes to lend his voice to the team during the evening.

Random says, “It’s a selfless service, it’s a thankless service, but they need us. We’re part of the show. If we weren’t here, there wouldn't be a show.”

The “Designated Drinker”

Random goes above and beyond his duties as an NSO to look out for the team. Years ago, his home league in California named him a “designated drinker’ at league after-parties — a title he’s carried into his NSO’ing with SCRD.

The designated drinker is somebody whom team members trust enough to hang around them and protect them from malicious characters at social events. In Random’s words, it’s like laying on the grenade when it comes to people buying drinks for league players. Sounds easy, right? Well, welcome to fucked up world of what women have to worry about. There’s a 7.8 percent chance you’ll be drugged at a bar — a statistic that disproportionately affects females, according to the American Psychological Association. Well done, humanity.

So Random does a little maneuver at league parties that goes like this. When skaters are talking to fans who have bought them a drink, if they don’t like the way the conversation is going, they will hold the drink over their left shoulder. Random walks behind them, grabs the drink, pounds it, and puts the glass back in their hand. All Random asks in return is that if he does in fact get drugged, the player helps him get back home safely. I’m both impressed and horrified, but Random sees the league players as his sisters, and he protects them if they need help.

And for the record, Random says he’s never actually been drugged, but the risk is always there.

When in Doubt, Just Hit a Bitch

After following around the league for six months, I’ve only been privy to a couple of parties. But the low party-to-month ratio wasn’t always the standard. According to Sticky Fingers, SCRD’s bookkeeper and unofficial team historian, the league was a bit of a party team in 2007 — meaning folks joined to have fun and skate around with their friends.

Sticky described her first time hearing about the league. She thought it sounded like fun, but remembering the contact part of the sport she asked her friend in SCRD, “Well, what are the rules?” Her friend replied, “There are no rules!” Which she thought sounded terrifying.

Sticky credited the transient culture of Las Vegas with creating this party roller derby team — where skaters were always moving and less inclined to put long-term goals into the league.

When Sticky officially joined the league, “They had just changed the rules to make it a little safer,” which caused waves on the team. Those who were around for the less serious roller derby league started to taper, and slowly, more athletes gravitated to SCRD. The rules needed to be adjusted to make the sport safer and less injury-prone, Sticky explains. The mentality of “just hit a bitch” when you don’t know what to do evolved into playing as a team and working together instead of being the star of the show.

The Origins of SCRD: “We were maybe too punk-rock in the beginning.”

Around 2005, Ivanna S. Pankin and Trish "The Dish" Ethier came to Las Vegas and founded Sin City Neanderdolls — the league that would later become Sin City Rollergirls, then finally Sin City Roller Derby. You might recognize these names now as the founders of RollerCon.

Ivanna had been quoted by the Las Vegas City Weekly saying, “We came here to Las Vegas and made exactly what we wanted. And that’s a team of girls committed to nothing but one another and the sport itself, and don’t really give a damn about being pretty.”

Ivanna’s first team on the Neanderdolls included “a former college basketball player, a burlesque dancer, a science professor from UNLV and a police officer.” She added, “Sin City started as a very diverse group of women, and we learned how to skate and be a team together.”

Before the league found its roots, Ivanna and Trish ended up moving back to Tucson to take care of Ivanna’s father. “We were maybe too punk rock in the beginning; playing outdoors, traveling a lot, etc. They [SCRD] moved indoors and made home teams, and my impression was that they stabilized a lot after we left,” she explains.

Who knows what transpired in the years after Ivanna left for Tucson and before Sticky joined SCRD, but today, it’s a whole new league. Sticky says there have been trends in terms of who joins the team over the years, they went from having skaters who just wanted to have some fun, then attracted military folks seeking a consistent group of friends regardless of location, and after that, they recruited a wave of moms who found the sport after their children joined the Junior League.

Forever and Ever Audrenaline

Veronica and Audrenaline posing for *Devoid*.

In the current Fresh Meat group, one rad mamma is Veronica Jefferis. The first thing I noticed about Veronica is how fabulous she is. She’s a stunning terror coming to fuck my day up when she’s up to be a Jammer and I’m supposed to block. Veronica is classic — she’s got a 50’s gangster vibe to her. She rocks red lipstick and pin-up style bangs with perfect wing-tipped eyelids.

When you watch Veronica skate, she glides gracefully, weaving in between other skaters, her hair sailing through her wake as she passes you. She’s been skating since she was four years old — something her older sisters helped get her into.

“I just picked it up, but I had my sisters to hold my hand, and teach me, and spin me — make me fly in circles, land me safely. So it seemed fun and easy,” Veronica says.

When Veronica’s daughter, Audrey, turned four, Veronica knew she was going to skate. And so the search for skate groups in the Vegas area began. “I knew what I grew up with and it was terrible,” Veronica reports about the skating community in her hometown in California.

It was when she was shopping for her daughter’s skates that she found the brand, Moxi. In their marketing, they showed pictures of girls skating on bowls and ramps, something Veronica hadn’t seen before. “And it was like, ‘Oh, wow, what are they doing? When did this happen?” she asked.

Audrey got really good at skating and before long, wanted to join the Junior League of SCRD.

“I said, well I don’t know anything about roller derby. I just know that girls go around in circles and they hit each other,” Veronica says smiling. “So I said, okay, and signed her up.”

When asked how Audrey — now Audrenaline — caught the roller derby bug, Veronica replied, “I think she was one of those Whip It victims. But during Covid, we used to skate with a bunch of girls and a lot of them did roller derby.” Audrenaline must have overheard them ask Veronica if she wanted to join and that they had a Junior League for skaters her age.

It wasn’t long before Veronica started helping coach the Junior League of SCRD where Audrenaline was practicing. Veronica was learning things from YouTube videos to suggest drills for practice. But she grew tired of videos and decided she wanted to join Fresh Meat to be a better coach, not just for Audrenaline, but for all the skaters in the Junior League.

Audrenaline is ten-years old now and loves roller derby. She says she’ll never give it up. She also insists she’s made a commitment to her derby name, “Forever and ever.”

And taking after her mother, she helps coach the other kids in her Junior League who need a little encouragement. Audrenaline shows other kids how to do a skill, then promptly provides feedback, “You got it — that was very good! And next time you’ll get it even more,” she says, cheerfully.

Derby For All

If you’ve ever thought about joining roller derby, SRA Pound Cakes has some advice, “Do it!! No one is too young or too old. Too much of a beginner or too advanced. We all have different journeys, body types, skill levels, learning styles, strengths & weaknesses. No one can derby like you derby!”

And she’s not wrong. Fresh Meat and upper league SCRD skaters range from 24 to 49 years old. Some have been skating their whole life, and others have just stepped into skates for the first time this year.
Another league skater, Bunnie says, “Try it out! Fresh Meat will help you decide if this is a sport for you. Even if you end up not wanting to play derby, you learned awesome skating skills!”

Worst case scenario, if you join Fresh Meat, you may break or fracture something, like skater Tracey Hill who fractured her sternum a couple of weeks ago. Yikes.

But best case scenario, you’ll pick up an absolutely thrilling sport that makes you feel like the coolest person alive. There’s really nothing that compares to the electricity you experience when you’re the Jammer and against all odds, you yeet your body through four skaters and emerge triumphantly to skate around the track.

As I’m writing this, Fresh Meat is just about to end — and although I can’t say with any level of certainty whether or not I’ll move up to the league, I’m proud of my purple bruises, all the badass skaters who had the guts to try this sport for the first time, and I’m proud to have a home league like SCRD in Las Vegas.

For more information about Sin City Roller Derby, go to: SinCityRollerDerby.org

The Road to Being a Badass is Paved by Eating Shit