A paper written a LONG time ago when our team first started up (AWESOME!!!!!): Amanda Davis Ethnography paper4 "You can do anything for two minutes” Round and round they go, when they will stop only the jammer knows. Tattoos flashing, green hair dancing, tutus bouncing, fish nets ripping, hundreds of fans cheering …this is a great time being had by all. I think the girl who just got knocked off her skates is even having a great time. When you are a Roller Derby girl this is the kind of action you skate for. Some of the girls join because they feel they need more confidence, some come for the friendship, some come for exercise, some want a new sport to play and others are looking for an outlet for some pinned up anger or wanting to have more fun in life. When you take off your skates to go home you have found all these things agrees Carly Hahn, Owner of Scenic City Roller Derby of Chattanooga, Tn., which started up a month ago. Scenic City is one of the two roller derby teams in Chattanooga. I met up with Carly, also known as Ghetto Blaster, at the Chattanooga outdoor skate park during a Wednesday night practice. There were 8 veteran skaters and 5 new “fresh meat” circling the track. She led them in some stretches while they circled the concrete space, rolling their shoulders back and forth and criss-crossing their quads. After a few minutes of this basic warm up they skated faster and were instructed to touch the turn on the outside. All at once she calls out “T-stop” and the girls came up on their toes in a stop and then changed directions. When she sat back down I asked her how she was introduced to roller derby. She said that a friend of a friend was talking about it and when she heard about a scrimmage (team against team) in town and she went to see what it was all about. “I was like Whoa, where has this been all my life, and knew immediately it was for me”. That was a little more than a year ago and since she said she has been working hard to become the advanced skater she is today. “When I first started I hugged the wall and had to run into it to stop” she says with a chuckle. You wouldn’t believe this to see her today. Her facebook profile picture is her doing a cartwheel on roller skates! I asked her how much she practiced to get where she is and she said that she spent at least 5 days a week on her skates. You can definitely tell who is putting in the time on their skates, she says. It was not a criteria to know how to skate when she was introduced to the Chattanooga Roller Girls derby team, but today, for their team, it is. Carly said that she enjoys training the women and watching how they improve as skaters. She looks forward to the opportunity to help other women find their place in Roller Derby now that she is recruiting for Scenic City. “You have to love it to do it” she says, otherwise you wouldn’t put yourself through the work and pain” she smiles. In the 1920’s the term “Roller Derby” was used to describe roller skate races. In the 1930’s Leo Seltzer came along and began a touring completion focusing on a more physical competition emphasizing skater collisions and falls. This evolved into the foundation of the team sport that still exists today: two teams of five skaters who score points by passing members of the opposing team (par.1). Leo passed down the business to his son in the 60’s and in the 70’s the popularity dwindled (par.2). In the 80’s and 90’s there were short lived attempts to revive the sport and they included the staged action and storylines, similar to professional wrestling leagues. It wasn’t until the early 2000’s when roller derby really started to take off (par.3&4). The Texas Rollergirls were the first flat track league in the nation to play a version of roller derby using new standardized rules and a track design that was based on the dimensions of the the old banked track. As flat track derby caught on in other U.S. cities, the Texas Rollergirls rulebook and track design eventually evolved into the specifications that were adopted and ratified upon formation of the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association also known as WFTDA in 2005(par.10). WFTDA is a nonprofit organization and each league is responsible for charitable donations and community hours. There are membership dues each girl pays, twenty dollars, which go toward their travel, and fifty five dollars a year pays for liability insurance, Connie Paty tells me in an interview. Today there are 109 full member leagues and 65 apprentice leagues according to the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association website. The names of the leagues usually represent the city or area in which they live, but their individual names are where you see the personality of the player. In my interview with Connie a.k.a., Conway Gritty her girls and mother are her cheerleaders. They wear shirts saying “I am Conway Gritty’s little bitty” her mother’s says, “Conway Gritty is my Little Bitty”. She described herself as a wall flower and not the aggressive type one would imagine to skate in Roller Derby. She saw the Chattanooga Roller Girls in a practice one Saturday afternoon when she had taken her girls to the Hamilton Skate Place. She said she immediately knew that is was something she wanted to do. “I already feel like this is a part of me” says new skater Trish Hatala who has only been to a few of the practices, I immediately felt it. Carly says there are a great mix of personality’s and an age group that ranges from 18 to 40. “We all get along really well, you become like a family”. “You have to have each other’s back out there so you don’t get hurt and to get the jammer safely around the track”. The two teams have a total of 5 players in a jam at a time, the jammer, three blockers and a pivot (who is also another blocker). The jammer is the only person able to score points for the team, and she wears a star on her helmet to distinguish her. The pivot blocker wears a stripe on her’s and is at the starting line; she sets the pace for the pack, and is usually the last line of defense to keep the opposing jammer from escaping the pack. The jammer’s goal is to pass opposing blockers and emerge from the pack as quickly as possible. The blockers play offense and defense. The blockers put themselves in front of the opposing jammer or the other blockers; they will hit or “check” the opposing team causing them to fall or go out of bounds. After the first jammer gets a full lap around the opposing team is when the scoring begins. Each time the jammer passes a skater of the opposing team legally (or without penalties), a point is scored. If the first jammer to get around in a bout is stopped or is unable to get through before the other jammer, she can place her hands on her hips repeatedly to stop the jam, and each team collects the points for their team, usually stopping the other team from scoring. This is when there is a thirty second break and the players can switch or replace their players. The two minute clock is then restarted and so is the jam. Minor and major penalties are called on skaters for breaking the rules of the game or illegal hits. The player is put in the penalty box for a total of a minute during the jam. You can find these rules and more procedures at the WFTDA website. When I asked Carly what would cause one to be kicked off the team? She said they don’t do it that often; it is really frowned upon and when it happens there is a voting procedure within the Board of Directors or a team vote. “There is a handbook that states the conduct each player should follow and fighting is definitely frowned upon”. “The Coach and each player is responsible for keeping up to date on the WFTDA rules, they are always updating their page on WFTDA” states Carly. She is working on making a “C-team” right now. “We want to become an A-team” and will need to scrimmage other “A teams” to become stronger competition.” They are working toward the apprenticeship program with the WFTDA. She predicts this will take a year or so. If this is a sport you are interested in you can show up at any one of the practices from 6:00pm-8:00pm on Wednesdays and 12:00pm-2:00pm on Saturdays, they are always looking for “fresh meat”! Works Cited “Roller Derby.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_derby, April 22,2011. Web.24 April 2011. “Women’s Flat Track Derby Association.” wftda/faq, 2010. Web 24 April 2011. Paty, Connie personal interview, 18 April, 2011 Hahn, Carly personal interview, 20 April, 2011
Posted on: Mon, 02 Sep 2013 02:46:24 +0000
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