Girl

Hilary and Clive Harrison, a married couple who manage of the Lewisburg Country Store off of Highway 99, are known for their creative sign poetry that advertises the newest beers in stock.

Intern Joe Covey and Lieutenant Shawn Morgan taking a break while on duty at the rural fire station on Lewisburg Road.

Joe Covey explains the use of the Wild Land vehicle, a fire truck that's used in fighting grass fires. Any staff or interns who give tours to reporters must buy everyone at the station ice cream. Covey will be purchasing ice cream later today.

Covey shows how interns are graded on their performance in drills and excercises. Once an intern has a mark in all of their boxes, they are eligable to become paid staff.

Father Steven Soot and his son help decorate the Lewisburg Historic Grange Hall for the holidays, which also doubles as a Greek Orthodox Church. The hall was turned into a church in 2003.

The colorful chapel includes Persian style carpets and brightly painted icons that seem to glow when the room is flooded with light.

CosMo Pain (Meghan Kyllo, left) blocks Face Kontrol (Mica Habarand, right) from passing her during a drill.

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 LB, 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. It’s a sport that requires discipline, skill, and above all, grit. As a person who makes an effort to avoid conflict, I’m unsure and a more than little nervous when my editor asks me to write a story on students who play for the Albany/Corvallis team. Like most who attend LB, my knowledge of derby exists little beyond its use in reality shows as an excuse to show dumb women in short skirts cat-fighting over some smarmy bachelor more in love with himself than any of the contestants.

When I arrive at the Linn County Fairgrounds for derby practice on Monday, I don’t see women in push up bras anticipating a male audience, or women with hulking bodies, tattooed limbs, and feathered mullets. Instead I find athletic women of all shapes and sizes, most in their late twenties and early thirties, gabbing about their weekends and sharing jokes. I instantly relax. These aren’t media-carved cutouts; these are relatable women I see every day at school and in my community.

Lil' Pwny (Melody Wirtz, center) enjoys a laugh with teammates Queen Bee Yotch (Jill Welch, left) and Wrath of Kant (Denise Cerruti, right) during a drill.

The 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 currently in the process of being groomed for games, or “bouts” as they are known in derby jargon. The team is still young and has only recently begun playing bouts, with their first one held last May, and the recruits are hoping the make it onto the travel team in time for the next scheduled season.

Face Kontrol (Mica Habarand, middle right) attempts to pass her teammates during drill. Each women must start at the back of the pack and work her way to the front, effectively blocking each teammate along the way.

With the lack of coverage of roller derby comes ignorance of the sport. Many outsiders find derby confusing and complicated, but any sports fan should be able to wrap their head around the anatomy of a bout, which actually has fewer rules than most national league-driven sports. A bout consists of two thirty 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 sets the pace of the jam and alert fellow teammates when another team’s jammer is approaching.

Wratch of Kant (Denise Cerruti, left) and Stitches and Bones (Keri Cribbs, right) practice blocking each other during drill. Both women use proper technique by keeping their elbows in as so not to get sent to the penalty box.

Upon entering the team, 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 insure 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, Little Pwny enjoys videogames, while Stitches 'n' Bones is both an archeologist and an avid knitter. CosMo Pain named herself after her favorite drink. Other handles I encounter include Smack Dapuss, Vicious Circle, and Face Control. The names seem to serve as a manifestation of the plucky personas players adopt in the rink.

Players often decorate their gear to reflect their own tastes and personal style. Here Vicious Circle (Denise Gardner) shows off her custom helmet.

Brick sees me standing awkwardly with a camera as the women get on their gear and immediately 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 to the fairground on Wednesday for another practice, Brick looks at me again and raises an eyebrow, a silent dare to put down my notebook and don some wheels. This time I nod. I’m ready.

Because of my limited ability to skate, I’m paired with the new recruits. Stitches 'n' Bones, our coach for the evening, glides over to us in a polka dot skirt with the grace of a ballerina (unsurprisingly I later find out she was trained in ballet as a child). She begins the intense 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 (use of elbows in a bout could get a player sent to the penalty box), effectively ruining any sense of balance you thought you may have had. After 30 seconds of merely standing in this position my calves are shaking and my back is burning so much I can feel it smoking.

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

We then move on to stops. Still in basic “seated” position, Bones skates over to a cone and abruptly stops, her right foot perpendicular to her left, as though in ballet’s third position. The other women quickly follow suit, stumbling and occasionally falling, but still faring far better than I, who instead practice against a wall in order to steady my wobbling legs. I can’t seem to drag my feet together in a any way that resembles Bones’s fancy footwork.

After this comes endurance training. The recruits groan in protest and I instantly begin to sweat. Bones starts her stopwatch and we do a series of sprints, each followed by a recovery period. We are reminded to stay as low as possible, remaining in basic position in order to increase our speed. By now my back is beginning to numb to the pain.

Bones easily laps me during the sprints.

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

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

Finally, we get to the jumps. Bones places several objects around our practice track and tells us we’re going to have to perform both one footed and two footed jumps if we’re going to pass the basic skills test needed to join the travel team. She encourages us to try the jumps we’re comfortable with. I protest loudly at the large suitcase laid out in front of us. Certainly we aren’t expected to jump over that?

“If a girl falls down in front of you, what are you going to do? You can either jump over her or trip over her,” Bones lectures me, and to punctuate her point, she whirls past the recruits and jumps over the suitcase as though it were some small obstacle and not an intimidating falling hazard.

At this point I decide that I should get back reporting the traditional way and quickly get out of derby gear and back into civilian attire. Across the room I can see CosMo Pain with the travel team and advanced players skating around the rink at break neck speeds, forcefully knocking each other off the track or onto the ground. Nobody cries or whines about chipped nails. While players are often referred to as “derby girls”, these are no girls - these are strong-willed women for whom pain is just part of the game.

“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. And roller derby isn’t one of the sports covered under Sports Insurance.

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

“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 to 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 which 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. Derby is not regularly covered by newspapers, and when it is, it’s usually relegated to the “community” or “fitness” sections, opting to emphasize the sport’s weight loss aspects rather than information about actual bouts. The LA Times recently ran a story about derby (“Derby Dolls: On A Roll in LA”) in the “Local” section of its website, while high school football and baseball teams are given regular “Sports” section coverage. The NY Times went as far to include an article about derby in the “Fashion and Style” section of its website (“Rolling, Rocking Nights Out for Mom”).

The flip side of stereotypes are those that depict derby girls as what Brick calls “tattooed bikers”. Although she acknowledges that growing up she’s been accused of “being too aggressive”, the aggressiveness that drives Brick and her teammates doesn’t limit their lives outside of derby to brutish endeavors. Outside of derby, 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 along side her husband Ian, a ref who occasionally must “Thourough’er Out”. Even refs are allowed derby names.

Brick Wallace (LaRae Wallace, left) and Rice Crackr (Lindsay Tokuda, right) pal around during practice.

CosMo Pain is now recovering from her scrimmage. She and 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.”

The travel team stretches and grabs some water after an intense two and a half hour practice.

Brick shares similar sentiments with me.

“You get to have conversations with women that you never thought women would talk about.”

“I’m also 40, and it’s nice to get in touch with 20 year-olds,” she says chuckling.

It’s true that there are some very young new blood among the group amid some of the older players. But there’s no ageism here. What CosMo Pain said earlier rings true to me. These people are family, and it is a love of derby that connects them all. No one is judged by their sex, age or ability. Even men are encouraged to become refs. The only requirement is an interest in derby.

Brick sums it up best.

“Show up and we’ll put you in skates.”

Some of the new recruits join the travel team for a group photo.

How You Can Join
You can show up to any of the practices and they’ll provide you with skates and gear. Practices are Monday and Wednesday from 7 to 9:30 pm at the Linn County Fairgrounds Expo. Center. You can also email Brick at sicktownderbydames@gmail.com. More information can be found at http://www.sicktownderbydames.com/. Players must be 21 years or older to join. Returning members will be expected to pay monthly dues and eventually purchase your own gear.

Queen Bee Yotch (Jill Welch, far left ), Wrath of Kant (Denise Cerruti, middle left), Face Kontrol (Mica Habarand, middle right), and Smack DaPuss (Natasha Cerruti, far right) practice their endurance during drill.

Queen Bee Yotch (Jill Welch, middle left) attempts to self-assist using teammate Face Kontrol (Mica Habarand, far left) with Wratch of Kant (Denise Cerruti, middle right) and Lil' Pwny (Melody Wirtz, far right) close behind.

Saint Nick (Nichole Havranek, left) skates around the track during practice with a smiling Brick Wallace (La Rae Wallace, right) behind her.

Vicious Circle (Denise Gardner, center) leads a pack of blockers during a scrimmage.

Roller Derby Moves

CosMo Pain (Meghan Kyllo), Brick Wallace (La Rae Wallace), and Rice Crackr (Lindsay Tokuda) show us how the game is played.

Blocks

CosMo Pain (left) and Birck Wallace (right) demonstrate how to correctly block another player during a bout. Players may use their hips, butt, torso, and shoulders to block the other team from passing.

Brick Wallace (right) uses her backside to block CosMo Pain (left) from passing. Because she does not use her hands, legs, feet, or elbows, this is a legal move.

CosMo Pain (left) shows an illegal elbow block. Elbows are strictly off-limits during a bout and offenders are sent to the penalty box. Players skate with their elbows in so as to not get fouled by the referees.

Using feet to kick or trip other players, as Brick Wallace (right) is doing above, is prohibited in derby and will get the offending player sent to the penalty box.

Using your hands to push or pull an opposing team's player, as Brick Wallace demonstrates above (right) is ground for being sent to the penalty box. However, players can strategically push their own teammates.

Assists

Rice Crackr (left) uses teammate Brick Wallace (right) in what is called a "self-assist". Assists are used to help a player (usuall a jammer) move to the front of the pack in order to pass it. Grabbing on to opposing team members is prohibited in derby, so players must only assist using their own teammates.

Brick Wallace (right) uses a "whip assist" to help Rice Crackr (left) get to the front of the pack. Whip assists involve one player helping another by pulling them from behind and then letting go.

Falling

CosMo Pain in "Baseball" fall position. Players who are knocked to the ground should try to glide into this fall so that they can quickly return to their feet. During derby it can be dangerous to remain on the floor for too long, as skaters can accidentally run over fingers or trip themselves over fallen players.

Here Brick demonstrates a second way to fall called "The Rockstar" in that it's a pose than many rock musicians make onstage during concerts. This type of fall allows players to quickly regain their footing, much like the "Baseball".

CosMo Pain shows a third way to fall called the "Superman" for its resemblance to the comic book hero. This fall is good way to distribute the stress of the impact to all four limbs instead of just one.

Brick Wallace demonstrates how not to fall. Players should always lean forward so that they don't land backwards and injury themselves.
The travel team give each other a group high-five after a grueling practice.