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WFTDA
______________________________ Always recruiting skaters, refs, volunteers and sponsors!
For more information e-mail contact@gr-rollergirls.com.
In the beginning…
April 2005: I was living in Eastown with a certain knife-wielding red head (aka. The Vindicator) and a mustache-twirling man-of-the-mike (our very own Niagara Balls). I had just gotten out of a relationship that ended badly, and I realized that I needed an outlet for my energy (or, rage), when a buddy from high school sent me a link to her roller derby team’s website. (The skater was the now-retired Ratt Scallion from Providence Roller derby).
I started looking at the team and fell in love; with skaters, their sport, and the incredible commitment it took to make it all happen. They looked so proud, and the footage of their bouts looked like the perfect mix of sport, feminism, camaraderie, fashion and rock n’ roll (The sport has changed a lot since those days).
I spent a good 10 hours that day researching online about the sport and immediately connected with Crash Baby who was starting the Detroit Derby Girls. My best friend and co-worker, The Vindicator, was away working in Ohio for 2 weeks, so I was very lonely. Clearly obsessed, I sent her at least 5 Emails that day filled with links and information on how WE were going to start up our own roller derby league.
The Vindicator, who was a press reporter at the time, didn’t ask a single question. She was hooked too.
We recruited our partners-in-crime, Ricochet, Bruzin Suzin, and MakeYaDizzy Lizzy to go to an open skate on a Friday night at the Plainfield Skating Center (may she rest in peace). There, we got our asses kicked by 10-year-olds. They were doing everything in their power to make us fall and it worked. That’s when we met Wheels McGee, who skated up to us like a knight in shining bearings. He told us we were going to die if we didn’t exit the skating floor, and he gave us free passes to Adult Night.
Lesson. Learned.
We needed to learn how to skate before we could start playing sports in skates.
From there, we made a cute little recruitment flier and started bugging our friends and their friends to come skate with us at Adult Night. This went on for about a month, with more and more girls showing up attempting to teach each other how to skate. One fateful night, the rink announced that they were canceling Adult Night. I spoke with the manager of the rink, explained that we wanted to start a Grand Rapids roller derby team, and wanted to have private practices at their rink. The only hitch being that we REALLY needed a skating coach to make that happen. They gave us 2 nights a week and a speed skating coach, the same man that saved our lives, Wheels McGee.
Our first official practice was hilarious. Out of about 10 girls, one person, Ricochet, knew how skate. Wheels taught ALL of us in 1 month. Within 3 months we had about 15 girls and started learning the fundamentals of the very complicated game of roller derby! That is, after we got insurance, protective gear, helmets, and a steel pair of balls.
Fast forward 6 months, we were hosting recruitment parties and fundraisers trying to get the word out about the Grand Raggidy Roller Girls. The name and logo came to me in a dream, with artist Ricochet creating the logos we still use today. We signed a contract with the DeltaPlex; a 5,000-seat-arena beyond our wildest dreams. They gave us April 1, 2006–April Fools Day–for our inaugural bout. Thanks, DeltaPlex.
We sold more than 2,000 tickets to that first game. The venue even ran out of beer! Grand Rapids came out in droves and supported their local Roller Derby.
Authors: Shutter Speed and The Vindicator
Happy 5 Year Anniversary, GRRG!
“How did you get involved with something like that?”
That was always the most common question, after “What is roller derby?” and “You mean like that Raquel Welch movie?”
How does a person become involved in something so unusual, unexpected, and (let’s face it) potentially self-destructive as roller derby?
For my version of the story, we travel back to early spring 2005….
“I’m starting a roller derby league with (Shutter Speed),” I said to my parents during a weekend visit to my childhood home.
This out-of-the-blue-to put it mildly-pronouncement was met with a bewildered, but not entirely unamused stare.
“Do you know how to roller skate?”
“No. Not yet. We’ll figure it out.”
Silence, followed by slow nods, as if to say “That sounds about right for our daughter.”
As we were in the early stages of founding the league, we were met with a lot of enthusiasm coupled with more than our fair share of public skepticism, derision and occasional outright hostility. Looking back on my years spent playing roller derby, from an outsider’s perspective, in a lot of ways – it was/is nuts!
But it was our diverse, driven group’s desire to determine our own value system for measuring the importance of roller derby and how we wanted to spend our free time (and where to funnel our passions) that kept us from giving up in a situation where those with lesser convictions would have crumbled.
This isn’t to overinflate the importance of roller derby. I understand that we weren’t exactly civil rights pioneers, but what the Grand Raggidy Roller Girls (and roller derby as a whole) did, and continues to do, in the grander scheme of things, is offer more choices to the women of West Michigan and beyond.
The friendship, competition, athleticism, fun and confidence are in some ways, simply icing on that derbilicious 5-year-anniversary cake. (Fun fact: Did you know that the traditional 5-year-anniversary-gift is wood? I will be sending the league a commemorative wooden mustache in honor of this milestone.)
Even in my comfortable bruise-free retirement in Florida, I still get stomach flips when I think of the feeling of standing in the pack for the first time in each bout.
So how DO you get into something like roller derby? (Not to mention start a league?)
You have to want it. It’s not really a world that is conducive to wishy-washiness. You have to want to do something kind of insane, be willing to suffer injuries, sacrifice your time with friends and family and be immune to those who can’t comprehend why you would choose to do such a thing.
Everyone’s choices for joining the GRRG – or any league – are unique to that individual, and they count for something. I hope that the women of West Michigan have that choice for the next 5, 10, 15, 50 years down the line.
I’m unbelievably proud to have been a part of something so special and thankful to Shutter Speed for asking Ricochet and me to join her in launching this crazy thing called GRRG.
Most of all, I’m happy I had the good sense to say “Why the hell not?”
—The Vindicator
