“I’m proud of myself for falling over,” I tell a circle of women, and they clap enthusiastically. Falling over in public as an adult doesn’t seem like a natural cue for applause. But I’ve just been inducted into the world of roller derby, and how to fall over safely on roller skates is the first, and arguably most important, skill you learn.
Roller derby is a full-contact team sport, played on roller skates. Largely a women’s game, it was first developed in America in the 1930s, although it’s only been in the UK since the mid-2000s. Two teams of five skaters compete on an oval track; each team has a ‘jammer’, who starts at the back and tries to break through the other team’s defensive players (a pack of ‘blockers’) in order to complete laps of the track and score points. The blockers try to bar the jammers’ way.
What follows is chaos on wheels. At a training session for this city’s oldest roller derby team, founded in 2008 and called (what else?) Sheffield Steel, the game teems with contradictions: the skaters are smooth and elegant one minute, then descend into clattering mayhem the next. Players are not allowed to use anything below the elbow or knee — so no grabbing hands, jabbing elbows, or kicking skates. As a result, blocking is mostly done by barging with the shoulders, hips and torso.
“Ignore the blood,” someone says blithely as they glide off the rink where the team trains at Skate Central, after a minor crash. It seems like a sport where you need nerves of, well, steel. Mine are more like spaghetti. It’s been 25 years since I was last on skates: as a kid, it was one of my favourite activities. Then secondary school happened, and not only did skating fall away, but any physical activity whatsoever. Like many people, I was mildly scarred by PE lessons at school — suffering the indignities of being picked last for teams, and sneered at for failing to run fast enough or throw hard enough. As an adult, I’m allergic to team sports, terrified my hopelessness will let everyone down.
But roller derby has a reputation for friendliness, and the amateur, member-run Sheffield Steel feels like no exception to this rule. Their motto is ‘Skating Fast, Hitting Hard and Being Excellent to Each Other Since 2008!’ and while they appear to be serious about all three parts of this, its the final pledge that they are arguably most devoted to . At the end of the introductory session I attend, all the newbies and instructors get into that circle and take turns to say something we’re proud of, and to praise someone else’s efforts too, to the sound of plasticky applause as everyone clacks their wrist pads together and whoops.
“What is cool about derby is it’s not really about winning,” says Dan, my enthusiastic point of contact at the team, who joined Sheffield Steel in 2018 intending only to be a referee before discovering she loved the confrontation of the sport (“Now I’m very much a dueller”). Still, whether or not Sheffield Steel is prioritising winning, they’re doing so anyway. In September, their A-Team did better than expected in the country-wide Five Nations play-offs, improving their ranking inside the top 14 teams within the UK. At the end of this month, they’ll be heading to Brussels for their first big international tournament since before Covid. They’ll compete in Tier 2 of that tournament but, when I ask if they’re now aiming to get up to Tier 1, Dan considers for a second and then says no. “Our aims are just to have fun.”
I wonder if this is why the sport has flourished within Sheffield, a city whose local character seems defined by friendliness and a certain understatedness. Make no mistake: roller derby really has taken root here. Sheffield Steel was one of the earliest teams founded in the UK, and the first in South Yorkshire. (Their orange-and-black strip has previously seen them gain sponsorship from Henderson’s Relish.) But they’re only one of three significant, competitive teams in Sheffield. A decade ago, for personal reasons now lost to the mists of time, a new women’s team called Hallam Hellcats split off from Sheffield Steel. Then there’s The Inhuman League, who rank impressively within the top 20 teams worldwide within the Men’s Roller Derby Association (although The Inhuman League are, somewhat confusingly, open to any gender). With men’s roller derby still fairly uncommon in the UK, they draw members from York, Hull and Nottingham. And both The Inhuman League and Sheffield Steel are fed by a lively junior team — something very few other British cities have.
“I don’t know of any other city that has the amount of roller derby teams that we have. It is unusual,” says Dan, adding that it’s particularly impressive that Sheffield’s teams have endured through Covid, when many towns and cities lost their teams altogether. As for rivalry — well, that’s not the roller derby way. ”There’s no animosity: it’s just really cool that we’ve been able to sustain three leagues. It’s a testament to the drive and passion of the skating community in Sheffield. You can literally start skating with us from ten, till whenever you want to stop.” Though roller derby is largely played by people in their twenties and thirties, Sheffield Steel has had members in their fifties and sixties — there is no upper limit.
“It doesn’t matter what team you’re up against, everyone’s nice. There’s no nastiness, it’s just not allowed — it wouldn’t fly,” says Sheffield Steel’s cheerful A-team captain, Kirk. This is her roller derby nickname, something every player has, and which is usually some manner of pun (Captain Kirk’s real name is Zoe). Kirk is another person who confesses to not being at all sporty as a kid: she’d never played any team sports before joining Sheffield Steel, yet it’s become central in her life. Kirk is now one half of a roller derby power couple: her husband saw how much fun she was having and got involved too. A bear-sized man whose roller derby name is Gigantor, he’s now captain for The Inhuman League and coaches Sheffield Steel.
Kirk wants to encourage other women who might not think it’s for them to give it a go. “Roller derby brings in a big range of people. You’ll see a whole range of sizes, shapes, fitness levels… if you don’t fit into other sports, you can fit in here.” Their league does showcase a real diversity of body types. That’s actually of practical help in roller derby. Jammers will typically be smaller, speedy and nimble, and blockers more commonly larger and stronger. But inclusivity also appears to be in the DNA of the sport. While moral panics and exclusionary practices surround many women’s sports, roller derby is welcoming to whoever wants to get involved. In the UK, the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association states that anyone who “identifies as a trans woman, intersex woman, and/or gender expansive may skate with a WFTDA charter team”.
“You will find a high percentage of the team are either somewhere under the rainbow, or somewhere on a spectrum,” says Juno, Sheffield Steel’s inclusion and diversity lead, a chatty woman sat at the side during training, No longer able to play following an injury, roller derby is such an important community to her that she continues to come along, helping out with refereeing and organisation. “We’ve got gay, lesbian, bisexual… trans… non-binary… asexual,” she says, counting off on her fingers as her teammates whizz by on the rink. “I think I’ve covered all the letters.”
Roller derby has long had a reputation as a punky, unconventional, DIY, and open-minded sport. While it was first concocted as a Depression-era live entertainment in the US, and waxed and waned in popularity there throughout the 20th century, an American revival in the early 2000s repositioned roller derby as an explicitly feminist team sport. It offered an empowering space for women to explore a different side of themselves — a fun, safe outlet for aggression and competition — with a notable crossover with the queer community. The buzz and excitement around this women-led, lesbian-led cult sport soon crossed the pond, with the first teams forming in London, Birmingham and Glasgow in 2006.
But in the early days of this revival, there was also a performative slant to the sport — wearing fishnets and facepaint was common — while derby aliases took inspiration from drag queen stage names. Think Skate Bush, Basha Fierce, Butch Crashidy, Bikini Whacks or, ahem, Clitty Clitty Bang Bang…
The 2009 film Whip It, in which a teen beauty pageant participant in Texas finds her happiest self on joining a roller derby team, took the sport mainstream. It’s cited by many of Sheffield Steel’s skaters as the reason they first sought out a team. Certainly, it heightened roller derby’s cool-girl image. Yet some of that has dropped away in the last decade. As it’s taken more seriously as a sport, some skaters have preferred to own their athleticism and use their real names (or at least opt for less suggestive pseudonyms). And while there are men’s leagues, it is still a rare example of a sport that is primarily associated with women, even as it sticks a middle finger up at any antiquated ideas of what femininity should look like.
During training, an A-team player named Wince glides over to me, and they explain that they ditched the latter part of their name: they were originally Wince Pie, a pun that “nobody gets” — especially not Americans, as they discovered as a teenager playing junior international matches with Team GB. Wince (real name Eileen) didn’t have to discover roller derby through Whip It — they were practically raised on wheels, with both their mum and dad playing the sport. Their dad even set up the Sheffield junior team and started teaching Wince when they were just seven. He has sadly since passed away, and is no longer able to watch Wince’s progress within the sport he loved. “He was dying at the time of the 2018 [junior championships] but he found so much passion in watching me do that… So I like to think he would be proud of me, yeah.” Wince’s teammates rallied around and supported them through an impossibly difficult time. “I have found a form of a family here,” they say. And they are evangelical about encouraging other people to join. “Come be our friend. We want to be friends with you, we want to teach you our weird and wacky sport.”
What, then, is their best tip for someone willing to learn roller derby but scared of falling over… a lot? Wince laughs. “If you haven’t fallen over, you’ve not tried hard enough.’ That was always my dad’s statement. Falling over will literally be your first lesson. We will tell you: ‘This is how you fall over’ and ‘This is how you fall over more.’”
This turns out to be accurate. Despite every instinct telling me don’t-fall-over, in my introductory session I’m soon dropping to my knees, mid-skate, and sliding across the floor on the huge knee pads. “Flare is encouraged,” says our tutor KitKat, goofily demonstrating how we might like to do air guitar or jazz hands in the air as we descend. But the real advice is all about bending our knees, getting low, and engaging the core as we go down. The aim is to maintain some control rather than resembling, as Wince puts it, a “floppy goose”. On my first attempt, I not only resemble a floppy, flappy goose, my distressed honking sounds like one too.
Roller derby is an incredible workout: I’m soon sweating like a demon into my (shudder) hired padding, and have discovered at least one thigh muscle I didn’t previously know existed. Across the morning, I reckon I fall over about 40 times — mostly deliberately, although at least two accidental backwards landings have my arse hitting the ground with such force I feel the impact juddering through my jaw.
To be honest, while the new skills and the camaraderie is all good fun, the likelihood of a bruised behind puts me off a bit. Various team members assure me that bruises are not only de rigueur, but a badge of honour. “If you have a nice bruise, everyone coos over it,” one player tells me proudly. Training has reminded me how much I enjoy skating, but I think I’m more destined for the roller disco than life as a jammer.
A shame, because I’ve been pondering what my roller derby name could be. Holly Shunter? Our Cow Holly? Williams the Conqueror? In truth, it’d probably have to be Thuddy Holly. That’s the sound of me hitting the floor, again.