This June, Portland’s Kristen Nawrocki and Rachael Carrico plan to start kicking some ass. They’ll target only other women. They’ll wear sexy/scary outfits and too much makeup. They probably will have props like baseball bats or nunchucks and they definitely will have alter-egos — Nawrocki’s will be “K-Rock,” Carrico’s “Betty Rage.” And they’ll do it all on roller skates. If all goes according to plan, they’ll be joined by at least 18 other women who have the same urges they do — to battle it out for team supremacy in the new wave of the old sport roller derby.
“I like the fact that girls aren’t really expected to be rough and kind of scary,” says Nawrocki, a 24-year-old photographer. “In derby, we can be just as bad-ass as guys, it’s cool.”
While roller derby originated as a male sport in 1935, the recent revival sweeping the country is exclusively female and exclusively kind of scary. Hundreds of women play nationwide in states like Texas, California, Massachusettes, and New York. They play on teams with names like “The Hustlers,” “The Derby Dolls,” and “The Assasination City Derby.” (This last team, from Dallas, is named in honor of the JFK assasination. Compassion be damned.) Derby has a new dark side where players dress up in fishnets, assume fake names and brazen personas, and garner local celebrity status for being rude and hot and tough. As Nawrocki describes it, shrugging, “Who wouldn’t want to be someone else for a day?”
And that’s a big part of the appeal for Nawrocki and Carrico, a cook. They first got into the idea of starting a Maine league while watching the reality TV show “Rollergirls” on A&E a few months ago. Since then, Carrico has looked into state grants for the team (she says the state has set aside money to “encourage women-only sports in Maine, since there aren’t very many”), Nawrocki has been scoping for a warehouse to make a flat track, and the two have held a couple meetings at a local pizza shop to generate interest. So far, they have enough women (10) for one team. They want at least two teams by June. They figure by then they’ll have sorted out the funding, the insurance concerns, the gear procurement, and taught people enough about the sport to play.
Of course, they’ve never played themselves. But they’ve done a lot of research and have charts and solid contacts with the Boston league when questions arise.
“The two teams start out in a V formation,” explains Carrico of the game, called a “bout.” She describes how the jammers, the forwards for the team, score points by blasting through the wall of opposing blockers. Once one jammer has broken the chain, the blockers fan out and try to shove the jammers into the wall or the floor. Jammers race around and around the track scoring as many points as possible before the lead jammer calls the round, 60 seconds is up, or someone is so hurt they need medical attention. The team with the most points at the end of an hour and half wins. Then, everyone hugs and goes out for beers.
