With names like Kung Fu Cupcake, Lizzy Luscious, Sweetness, SmackDown Town and Slaughterhouse Thighs, women's flat track roller derby, Traverse City's newest game in town, is bound to get some attention. But the skaters who play for TC's first--and fledgling--roller derby teams, the
Traverse City Toxic Cherries and the
Traverse City Derby Dahlias, are aiming to introduce a true, competitive sport to locals that will add to its loyal but small fan base and in the process give an elbow to local economic activity.
"This is a sport that's growing. We already have fans here. We know this could be big, but we need the sponsors and we need a permanent place to skate," said Jenn Price, a Traverse City art gallery worker and mother of two who skates for the Dahlias as Jeneral Killz.
Until a permanent venue can be found, the Dahlias and the Cherries are renting ice rinks, roller rinks and warehouses in and outside of Traverse City for practices, scrimmages and bouts. In the meantime, they're buying their gear and other necessities from local businesses, including Lifer Skateboard, and forming other relationships with supporters, sponsors and the community by holding scrimmages, parties, fundraisers and other public events.
"Absolutely, we have a lot of interest. People email us regularly, 'When are you going to have a bout? Where can I get a t-shirt?' There are a number of larger companies in the area with the interest...It all comes back to we need a place to perform locally," Sarah Johnston, a skater for the Toxic Cherries, says of the search for a permanent bout venue.
Johnston, a Walter Payton fan--thus her skater name, Sweetness, and her jersey number, 34--is a general manager for Ferrell Gas living in Traverse City and sees big things for the sport. She says roller derby is truly competitive and loud, rough and entertaining-- and a real sport with rules and strategy that can pull in any sports lover.
When Johnston, Price and their teammates aren't suited up in their unis, helmets and pads and making holes for the jammer to score, harkening back to roller derby's glory days in the 1940s and 1950s, they are nurses, web designers, baristas, physical therapists, bank loan officers, waitresses, fashion designers, bartenders, teachers.
The Toxic Cherries, the first team to form in Traverse City in January 2010, about six months before the Dahlias, sport black and toxic green uniforms while the Dahlias borrow from the hot pink palette of the flower they're named after. The Dahlias formed when two players from the Toxic Cherries split off.
Two or more teams in one city is a good thing because they can play bouts against one another.
The Toxic Cherries' first official bout came last month, and its biggest gig to date, a bout on Dec. 11, takes place against the Lansing Vixens at the Rivertown Sports in Grandville. Their bout comes before the main event featuring the Grand Raggidy Roller Girls.
"We're like the opening act for lack of a better terminology," Johnston says. "They've been established for a number of years. We're excited because it will get us exposure."
Exposure could move the Cherries further along the track of becoming an official team. Becoming an official league team is a process that can take two years or more.
The teams need sponsors and a permanent place to hold bouts and money to function.
"The team is run by volunteers like a business and it relies on sponsors," Price says.
The Cherries and the Dahlias are proceeding as most new roller derby teams do: with the players owning the team and their friends, family and fans helping them get it going.
This is far from the more usual model of a big-bucks owner in a custom suit running the town sports dynasty.
"The ethic is still very DIY and grass roots...It goes back to the teams being democratic, athlete owned," says Juliana Gonzales, executive director of the U.S. Women's Flat Track Association in Austin, Texas. "This grass roots approach makes derby very nimble in responding to their fans...rather than keeping owners and investors happy."
Most derby is played on a flat track due to the lack of banked tracks and the expense of building them. The Association has hundreds of leagues in its membership, including the successful Detroit Derby Girls, which recently moved to a larger venue to accommodate crowds and the Grand Rapids leagues, all of which once were in the infancy stages that Traverse City's teams are struggling through now.
The Toxic Cherries are working on becoming an apprentice league and hoping the Grand Rapids Raggedies will be the sponsor, a requirement.
"We want to be a member with the full league so the points for bouts add up and we can get into tournaments, championships," Johnston said.
The case for their membership can be made beyond the team, as well. Official bouts, tournaments and championships add up to a boost to the local economy.
"The economic impact has a couple of arms to it. Definitely there are teams that rent or buy space to practice and play. They'll put a rink with an office, a meeting room for watching footage, in a warehouse. They'll store merchandise there, ship from there...Everybody's having some kind of impact that way," says Gonzales, who skates derby in Austin, which has seen major success.
"The other huge economic piece is just ticket sales. It affects a city's tourist numbers. When there are ticket sales and people come in, there is money being spent. Also, it's common for leagues to be involved with charities and to bring that to a community."
Traverse City's derby girls--some long time skaters, some new to skating, all of them lovers of team sports and competition--are putting in as many as three practices a week and doing "double duty," as Price puts it, as athletes and team treasurer, vice president and other administrative positions.
There are about 21 active skaters on the Cherries and about 40 people altogether involved with the team, when you count volunteers, including a medical committee--hey, it's a rough sport. The Dahlias have about 15 players.
Official numbers are hard to come by, but Gonzales estimates that the number of derby leagues doubled in the last decade, growing from maybe a dozen in 2000 to about 30 in 2004 to about 400 in 2010.
She attributes part of the success to pop culture--for instance, the portrayal of roller derby in the 2009 movie
Whip It, directed by
Drew Barrymore.
"A couple of things were going on in the collective consciousness. After and about the time the Drew Barrymore movie you all of a sudden were seeing little infusions to roller derby in sitcoms, cartoons, other places," Gonzales says. "It's entered the collective mind."
Kim North Shine is a Detroit-area freelance writer, frequent visitor to Traverse City and a roller skater from way back who harbors the fantasy of becoming a derby diva.