The arena is deafening. For the fans in the crowd, the screaming and excitement overwhelm their ears. The players in the rink, though, only hear the whirring of roller skates against the floor as they plot their way through the waves of opposing skaters. The pace is blinding, the scoring is high. This is roller derby, played at thousands of locations across the nation and beyond.
Roller derby in its most current iteration is incredibly young by sports standards, only appearing in the early 2000s. Roller skating sports have been a phenomenon for a while — since roller skates were invented — including forms of roller derby. However, the newest iteration is very different as it focuses on feminine identity, rebellion, and community through the inclusion of diverse communities like the LGBTQ+. Players race at high speeds around a track, with a “jammer” trying to score points by winding around the opposing team’s “blockers.” Since its beginnings in Austin in 2001, roller derby has become a nationwide phenomenon.
Austin Roller Derby (Austin RD) is a major Austin-based derby organization composed of six teams with both mixed gender and all-women’s teams containing a range of competition levels. The Texas Roller Girls is another women’s flat track roller derby league founded in Austin. Katrina Whitehair, also known as “Kat Trix,” and Kelly McNeil, or “Kelarella de Vil,” are the president and vice president of Austin RD. They discussed the specific connection of roller derby to Austin.
“It started here in Austin, Texas, the rebirth in the nation in the early 2000s was here in 2001 with Texas Roller Derby,” Whitehair said. “And then shortly after, Texas Roller Girls started in 2003. There’s more Derby in Austin than most places in the country.”
Both Whitehair and McNeil began playing derby in 2010. Although McNeil started in California, and Whitehair in Kentucky, McNeil described Austin as the “Mecca” of roller derby.
“I started in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2010 with Derby City Roller Girls,” Whitehair said. “I moved to New York City in 2012, and around 2013, 2014, I joined Gotham Roller Derby and started doing their basic training program. The years that I was there, the All Stars at Gotham were number one, number two, number three in the world … they had a huge league. There were 120 skaters when I was there.”
Whitehair ended up moving to Texas in the late 2010s, after leaving the sport. She eventually found herself in the birthplace of modern derby, and she was drawn right back into the sport.
After COVID here in Austin, I just hadn’t had enough, so I came back four years later in 2021, and the rest is history,” Whitehair said. “I’ve always come back to derby.”
McNeil has experienced a very different story and has started from much smaller leagues on the other side of the country. However, she still found a place for herself in roller derby and in Austin.
“I started in Merced, California, with the Rollin’ Roulettes,” McNeil said. “Early times, very small league, I think, at the very max height of it, we had 50 people … I got recruited just because I was kind of like a riot girl, punk rock girl … and little did they know that I was also an athlete. It was also a really good fit for me because I believed in, you know, kind of the shenanigans of Riot Grrrl, protest and activism, but also I am very competitive.”
Austin Roller Derby teams are numerous and varied. Their top travel team is known as the Greatest Hits, and they are the team that Whitehair plays for. However, according to rankings from Women’s Flat Track Derby Association, the Texecutioners, who are the travel team for the Texas Roller Girls, are the top-ranked one in the South. Austin Anarchy is another prominent Austin group, currently operating as an open-gender league with multiple home teams and a travel team. The Austin Free Radicals, McNeil’s team, is a more casual scrimmage pickup team that plays mostly within Central Texas.
“We go to San Antonio, we go to wherever they invite us, pretty much,” McNeil said. “Because it’s a scrimmage pickup team, we never really know who’s going to play.”
Alongside the usual flat-track roller derby, there is also banked-track roller derby, which involves a much higher-speed, tilted track. While the changes are small, the culture is entirely different. The higher amounts of upkeep required usually result in for-profit organizations surrounding it, which contrasts with the usually non-profit flat-track.
“Banked track is definitely more in the entertainment field, although it is competitive,” McNeil said. “The easiest way to make the comparison is like professional wrestling, like Wrestlemania, you know, where it’s very theatrical, but the physical competitiveness is still present. However, the goal is to entertain because, again, you’re bringing in folks, and so you’re having a show.”
While the competitive aspects can be important to people like McNeil, roller derby is also notable for the community and growth it can foster in people. From its beginnings as an inclusive, diverse sport, this has been a key goal of the new wave of roller derby.
“Roller derby saved my life,” Whitehair said. “Adulting is hard, moving to a new city is hard, making friends is hard, staying in shape is hard, and roller derby is that outlet. You build community, you make lifelong friends, you compete physically. It’s mentally challenging. It checks all the boxes to create the lifestyle that I enjoy, and it’s had a huge impact on who I am as an individual in the world. I would not be who I am without it.”
From preteens to people in their fifties, people across all ages have found a community in roller derby. LASA alum Karter Henkelman began playing roller derby in an Austin youth league during his junior year. He has continued that passion while attending college in Canada.
“I was one of the oldest, but it’s like just an amazing community of people,” Henkelman said. “My travel team that went all around the U.S. There were 18 of us, ranging from ages 12 to 18. Most of them were 13 or 14. It was such an amazing community for me to be a part of. Everyone was so accepting and kind in a way that I had never seen before. And it was good to see people that were like me in it. It was an amazing community, and it still is.”
Henkelman highlighted that roller derby can be challenging to get into. However, those who have experienced it say that the benefits far outweigh the costs.
“The hardest part, I think, is actually learning to skate, just because the learning curve is so steep,” Henkelman said. “You get there and you’ve never skated before, and suddenly you have to hit people on wheels, which is really scary at first. You get hurt a lot in the beginning, especially when you don’t know how to fall and how to do all these things. But I didn’t have a lot of social challenges. It was just mainly actually learning how to play and how to play well and safely.”
As the sport keeps on growing and changing, Roller Derby continues to push sports boundaries. On both the competitive and casual levels, a new generation of derby players is sure to be welcome.
“It’s really terrifying at first, and there’s so many rules,” Henkelman said. “And there are these people, they look so cool, and you’re like, wow, I don’t feel like I can talk to them or do something that’s that cool, but it’ll be okay. Just do it.”
