By day, they are a medical coder, a property manager, HVAC technician, audio engineer or a high school senior.
When the Black-N-Bluegrass (BBRD) flat track roller derby team meets for practice at Hits Inside Baseball in Fort Wright, however, they take on fearsome skate names – Briggs & Smack’em, Ursa Maimer, Alaskan Assassin and Sam-I-Wham.
What is more: They are part of a four-wheeled sorority – skaters from other teams came from as far as Dayton, Ohio for Thursday’s practice.
“I think what we do is really a wild thing, it’s really an impressive thing,” Calliope “Ursa Maimer” Wright of Covington, said. “I have such respect for anyone who can stick around and do it. I want to hold my own and, like, be as cool and tough as all the people that I’m playing with.”
Melissa “Mellkat” Mitchell, who runs an art gallery in Cincinnati’s Pendleton neighborhood, likes roller derby’s speed compared to baseball’s frequently standing still.
“There’s not a lot of waiting around, usually,” she said. “It’s not like football, where you get a few seconds of action and you’re waiting around. It’s fast-paced – go, go, go.”
Multiple ability levels
BBRD has been around since 2006.
Some of the women, like Dora “Tank” Rice and Richelle “Silverose” Davis, were athletes in high school and college. Rice played softball and cheered at Campbell County, and Davis played softball and basketball and was in the color guard and band at Beechwood.
“I didn’t know how to skate at all,” Davis said.
Wright didn’t have a lot more experience – skating parties in fifth and sixth grade.
“I could get on skates and I could move, but I was not doing anything impressive by any stretch,” Wright said.
Each skater has a nickname and a tagline in their online biography. Wright said hers is a takeoff on Ursa Major, a constellation of stars you can see in the northern sky.
“They’re usually puns, sometimes kind of tongue-in-cheek,” Wright said.
Highlands senior Abigail “Shiner” Hudson takes her nickname from the Roger Hargreaves children’s book “Little Miss Sunshine” which she loved as a 7-year-old at Johnson Elementary School.
“I changed it to Shiner, like the black eye,” she said.
Not your grandparents’ derby
Black-N-Bluegrass is a member of the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (wftda.org) of Austin, Texas. According to the Texas-based organization, there are 441 leagues worldwide on six continents.
Going into Saturday’s bout at Akron Roller Derby, BNBG is 3-2 and ranked 68th out of 132 teams in the WFTDA’s Northeast Section.
Comparing flat-track derby to the scripted one-hour shows of the ‘60s and ‘70s your grandparents watched Saturday afternoons on WXIX-TV (Channel 19) or saw at the old Cincinnati Gardens is kind of like measuring fifth-grade touch football against the Cincinnati Bengals.
Rosie “Briggs N. Smack’em” Briggs sometimes tires of one set of questions from non-skaters.
“Usually it’ll be like, ‘Are you Derby-in’ this weekend? You gonna go rollerbladin’? You gonna throw some elbows?” Briggs said. “One, a roller derby game is called a bout. Two, throwing elbows is very illegal, and you can get called on an egregious hit and get kicked out of the game. And three, we skate on quad skates, not inline.”
Each team has a jammer, who wears a star on her helmet cover and is the only one who can score points, and four blockers. (One of the blockers may be the pivot, who wears a stripe on her helmet but can score points if the jammer hands her the star.)
Games consist of two 30-minute halves, and jams last two minutes. The first person who escapes the pack, the lead jammer, circles it and scores points by effectively lapping the other team. She can cut off, or end, the jam by touching her hips.
Abigail Hudson’s mom, Trudy “Scrappy Sue” Hudson, sometimes grimaces when her daughter hits the polished concrete floor.
“As long as I see her get up, I’m OK,” Trudy said. “I know her well enough to know I can tell she’s hurt by the way she’s skating.”
Wright said veteran skaters have different needs from lesser-experienced ones.
“A lot of it is just trying to build people’s confidence and letting people make mistakes and not making people feel bad for the mistakes,” Wright said.
Shannon “Crochete” Duggan of Villa Hills crochets. (Her skate name is a mashup of crochet and machete). She’s been out several weeks with a partially torn medial collateral knee ligament, but she doesn’t have to wear a brace anymore and hopes to return to the track in August.
“Once you start to play, it’s hard to come watch ‘cause you want to be out there,” Duggan said. “I’m ready.”
After Saturday’s journey to Akron (a 130-66 win over the Rowdy Rollers), Black-n-Bluegrass has road trips at Somer City Aug. 3 in Somerset, Kentucky and Chicago Style Aug, 24. The next home bout is Sept. 14 against the Gem City-Violet Femmes (Dayton, Ohio).
Briggs treats each bout as an educational opportunity.
“This is real, live roller derby,” she said. “We don’t act, it’s very grassroots; we buy our own gear, we pay our own dues.
“We don’t make any money in this. It’s completely volunteer.”