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Derby Dames roll on

Maya Lazaro
The Commuter

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

The Sick Town Derby Dames

To friends and family she’s known as Meghan Kyllo. By her teammates she’s known as CosMo Pain.

When not studying to get into the diagnostic imaging program at LBCC, she spends her free time knocking women to the ground in spandex and lace-up skates.

This is the world of roller derby – a sport dominated by women in knee-high socks and ruffled skirts, unafraid to show aggression in the rink.

The Albany/Corvallis team, named the “Sick Town Derby Dames” by founder and president “Brick” La Rae Wallace, was formed in July 2007, when Wallace got involved with a team down in Eugene and wanted to bring the derby experience to her area.

The team began small, with only eight women coming to practice each week. Through recruiting and fundraising, however, the team now boasts a “travel” team of 14 players, as well as 20 new recruits who are in the process of being groomed for games, or “bouts,” as they are known in derby jargon.

A bout consists of two 30-minute sessions, each session containing several two-minute races around the track called “jams.” A “jammer” from each team must successfully lap the pack of “blockers” and “pivots” in order to score enough points for their team to win the bout. Jammers are awarded with one point for each player of the opposite team that they pass.

Blockers use their shoulders, butt, torso, and hips (hands and legs are off-limits) to stop jammers from lapping them, while pivots set the pace of the jam and alert fellow teammates when another team’s jammer is approaching.

Each woman chooses a unique nickname that she uses during bouts, practices, and get-togethers. The name is then checked against a national register of derby names to ensure that there are no doubles.

Nicknames usually have some sort of personal meaning to the player, but some are just a clever play on words. For instance, Lil Pwny enjoys video games, while Stitches ‘n’ Bones is both an archeologist and an avid knitter.

CosMo Pain named herself after her favorite drink. Other handles include Smack Dapuss, Vicious Circle, and Face Kontrol. The names seem to serve as a manifestation of the plucky personas players adopt in the rink.

Giving it a try

As the women put on their gear at the Linn County Fairgrounds, Brick sees me standing awkwardly with a camera and invites me to skate. I politely decline, too afraid to ditch my warm winter boots, but after snapping photos of the girls practicing blocks, falls, and jumps, I begin to feel inspired. They all make it look so easy.

When I return on Wednesday for another practice, Brick looks at me again and raises an eyebrow – a silent dare. This time I nod. I’m ready.

I’m paired with the new recruits. Stitches ’n’ Bones glides over to us in an emerald-green skirt with the grace of a ballerina. She begins a two-and-a-half-hour practice with a lesson in posture. We’re instructed to “sit” in our skates, a basic derby position in which your knees are bent at a 90-degree angle.

On top of this, you must lean forward and keep your elbows in, effectively ruining any sense of balance. After 30 seconds of merely standing in this position, my calves are shaking and my back is burning.

“Don’t slouch,” Bones warns us, eyeing my rounded torso. “Keep your back straight.”

Then comes endurance training. The recruits groan in protest, and I begin to sweat. Bones starts her stopwatch and we do a series of sprints, each followed by a recovery period. All this time we are told to stay as low as possible, remaining in basic position in order to increase our speed. My back is engulfed in flames.

Bones easily laps me during the sprints.

“You should be giving 70 to 85 percent effort during recovery, and 100 percent effort during sprints,” she says as we start to slack off. I become distracted by the colorful knee-high socks recruits are wearing and lose my footing. I fall to the floor.

“You want to keep you palms closed when you fall,” she tells me, “or your fingers could be run over.”

When the recruits begin jumping exercises, I decide that I should return to reporting the traditional way.

Across the room I can see CosMo Pain with the travel team and advanced players skating around the rink at breakneck speeds, forcefully knocking each other off the track or onto the ground.

“If you go to a rink, you’re bound to fall and hurt yourself,” Brick tells me when I ask her about the dangers of derby. With proper technique, players can avoid injury by absorbing hits or falling like pros, but for inexperienced players injury is more common.

Why derby?

I’m fascinated as to why these women dedicate themselves to such an inherently violent sport.

“I’ve been skating since I was nine years old,” says Marisol “Jala Pain Yo” Rodriguez, a paralegal student at LB with whom I spoke by phone. “It was a great opportunity to get on skates again.”

Players who skated as children refer to themselves as rink rats and value the chance derby gives them to recapture that experience. But for most team members, it’s more than just the chance to skate that draws them derby.

“It’s rough, fun, aggressive, and girly. We get to wear skirts and fishnets.” Brick indicates towards her skull-adorned skirt. “It’s a full-contact sport, but we’re still able to look like girls.”

The “looking like girls” aspect of the sport has also contributed to the ever-pervasive stereotype that derby isn’t a real sport like football or hockey, but rather a campy game women play to lose weight when they aren’t cleaning house or cooking dinner.

Roller derby receives no funding beyond what teams make during fundraising, efforts that include everything from car washing to garage sales. Players must buy their own gear and pay monthly dues to their teams or leagues, and they rarely, if ever, get paid to play.

The aggressiveness that drives Brick and her teammates doesn’t limit their lives outside of derby to brutish endeavors, though. Outside the rink Rice Crackr manages a restaurant, Toxic Spill is a math professor at OSU, Saint Nick teaches art to children, and Queen Bee Yotch works at a retirement home in Albany.

Brick’s day job is spent doing research for OSU, and the team includes a slew of nurses. Many of these women are married and have families. Shannon “Tits ‘n’ Tofu” Pfingsten can often be seen skating alongside her husband Ian, a ref who occasionally must “Thourough’er Out.” Even refs are allowed derby names.

CosMo Pain is now recovering from her scrimmage. She and fellow teammate Jala Pain Yo are jammers, a position that requires speed and agility, and the practice has left her catching her breath. She’s back to laughing and smiling though when the travel team begins cool-down stretches.

“Derby draws women together,” she tells me when I ask about what motivates her to play. “They’re like family.”

Comment

Hi, Maya:

Congratulations on your promotion-enjoyed your article

— Tricia · Dec 6, 09:55 PM · #

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