[Editor’s note: This is the first part of an occasional series documenting the typical day of a campus community member.]
Junior individual studies major Ginger Park spends nearly every moment at home on roller skates. Whether finishing homework, doing laundry or cooking meals, she’s zipping through the house listening to the Dead Kennedys on her four-wheelers.
Park’s free nights are devoted to practicing and strategizing for her favorite pastime: the all-female – though completely unladylike – sport of roller derby.
One of the founding members of DC Rollergirls – the Washington area’s only league for female roller-derby enthusiasts – Park is among a growing number of women who devote their spare time and health insurance money to an underground sporting world of thrown elbows and painful blocks, where girls whip around roller rings, share phone numbers of tattoo artists and proudly compare bruises and broken bones.
Park’s days and nights are spent with the women who have breathed new life into roller derby over the last few years. The sport is a mix of adrenaline-pumping athleticism and hardcore cattiness. It has changed drastically since Chicago promoter Leo Seltzer created the Transcontinental Roller Derby in 1935, where teams of one man and one woman took turns skating nearly 4,000 miles.
More than 70 years after Seltzer’s invention, young women have stayed true to roller derby’s initial balls-to-the-wall attitude while trading yesterday’s demure outfits for revealing, punked-out uniforms. For participants, quad roller skates are the only kind permitted – so leave the Rollerblades at home.
For women like Park, the sport is liberating partly because of its encouragement of violence and ferocity. Teams can have 10 or 15 girls and skaters are divided into blockers and jammers. The only way a team’s jammer can score is to slam, claw or force her way through the opposing team’s crowd of blockers, then lap once and continue passing other skaters in a span of two minutes. Games aren’t long, drawn-out matches; they’re quick and dirty bouts.
The game can get so out of control that the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association issues a new rule book each year, which dictates the no-no’s of the game. Choking an opponent with the straps of her helmet? Bad idea. Attaching spurs to your skates, Ã la Ben-Hur? Even worse idea.
The intensity of the game is what attracted Park, a former competitive ice skater who quit at 15 after breaking her hip. At 24, Park took out her lip ring and got an internship with Congress, and enrolled at the university last semester.
But roller derby gave her an excuse “to wear fishnets every day” and keep up her athleticism, and in January she co-founded DC Rollergirls with other local derby fans.
DC Rollergirls, the Washington area’s all-female amateur league, is made up of 60 women who range in age from 19 to 40. The women compete from April to August and each has a roller derby nicknames. Park, a jammer, is known as “Hello Kittastrophe.”
Today there are about 100 amateur female leagues in the United States, and an annual RollerCon started two years ago. Suburban America got a glimpse into the world of modern roller derby with A&E’s series Rollergirls, which concentrated on the TXRD Rollergirls but was canceled after only a few months on the air.
Males are completely expendable, and serve only small roles in the roller derby world, said Park’s best friend and fellow Rollergirl, Katie Coram, 23, or “Slam Bam Thank You Ma’am.”
“The only males involved are our bitches,” Coram said.
A typical day for Park starts at 5:45 a.m. and veers between work and school. On the busiest days, Park uses her lunch breaks from work to drive to the campus for class.
After her intellectual labor is done, Park’s physical training begins. Roller derby practices can occur up to four times a week and include a scrimmage and both off- and on-skate training, with rapid-fire pushups and sit-ups, suicide drills and different blocking techniques, such as hip checks and booty blocks.
For derby girls, injuries are a part of the daily grind.
Though Park has repeatedly injured her knee at practice and recently learned she has both arthritis and tendonitis, her routine will not change.
“You gotta expect [the aches and pains],” she said. “You’re going to get really sore, and you’re going to have bruises.”
After weeknights of intense practice, Park often spends her weekends with teammates at recruiting events and fundraisers, most recently at Dr. Dremo’s Taphouse in Arlington, Va., on Saturday. The venue drew a crowd of derby enthusiasts for the “Red, White and Bruised” benefit show, which featured local bands, arm-wrestling matches and a spanking booth.
Every moment of any day is a chance for recruitment. Each morning, Park stuffs her bag with flyers and stickers to pass out to anyone from students to her professors. She hopes to gain enough of a campus following to create an intramural roller derby club.
“Everywhere one of us goes, we’re repping it,” she said.
Although Park’s days are a busy mess of grueling classes, arduous work and bone-shattering practice, she wouldn’t change a thing, she said.
“I wanted a normal life,” she said. “I didn’t exactly get a normal one, but it’s a little bit perfect. Getting a degree and going to grad school is so important to me. The derby is the same thing – I’m so passionate about it. I don’t sleep much, but I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
Contact reporter Roxana Hadadi at roxanadbk@gmail.com
