 Hi, and welcome to Authors at Alden. We're so happy to have Samantha Tucker and Amy Spears here today. Samantha is an anti-racist teacher, a writer and editor in Columbus, Ohio. She writes personal essays, memoir and cultural critique having earned her MFA and MA in creative nonfiction. Her essay, Fountain Girls, originally published in Ecotone, is a listed notable in the Best American Essays, 2017 and is anthologized in contemporary creative nonfiction. Her other essays have been published with Literary Hub, Columbus Alive, Bust, Brevity and Gernica. In her spare time, Sam loves protest, mutual aid, roller derby and karaoke. Amy Spears also lives in Columbus where she is in her second decade as a skater with the Ohio Roller Derby. She spent several years in the leadership of the Women's Flat Track Derby Association and I'm sure we'll hear some about that today. She's given presentations, workshops and talks all over the place about roller derby. Her co-authored essay, World's Collide, Facebook Family and George Costanza was published in the journal Harlett, a revealing look at the arts of persuasion and her prose and poetry have appeared in Columbus Alive, Link's Eye and Wine X. A self-described collector of hobbies, she'll try just about anything once and I'm sure that was roller derby at one point. So those are the official bios from the back of the book, which is available for sale. Since a book was published, they have been all over the place, kind of a Midwest tour. They had a fabulous launch at $2 radio headquarters in Columbus and also the Ohio Anno Book Festival and Columbus Book Festival and Thurber House, all of that in Columbus. They've been to Pittsburgh, Madison, Ann Arbor and Athens, Ohio and their team is the Ohio Roller Derby team, right? That's the official, whoo! With fans. They can't go with their own band. Excellent, we love groupies and they beat Minnesota, which was higher ranked than them and did really well in the Canada tournament so it's likely that they're gonna be in the playoffs this year. So, and they will be interviewed by Rachel Turman, I'll try not to fall off the stage, who is an associate professor of sociology at OU. She specializes in Appalachian study, rural studies, rural sociology, sociology of gender and identities, women's studies and social inequalities. She has published two books as well and several articles and she plays for the Appalachian Hellbetties, our home team. So, thank you and welcome. All right, hello. I'm so pleased to be here today to talk about this book and again, welcome Sam and Amy. Thank you so much for coming down to Athens, via children. And thank you all for being here this afternoon too. Like Beth said, I'm gonna hear my official capacity as associate professor of sociology and because of my major hobby that I started a year, just about a year ago, which is skating with the Athens, Ohio, roller derby league, which has just been a dream come true for me. So I'm wearing this wool blazer on this warm October day to look professional, but I've also got my Appalachian Hellbetties shirt underneath here. So I wanna start off by saying thank you for writing this book. There were many times while I was reading it that I just really appreciated a lot of the insights that were in the book and many times I was thinking, yes, that's so true. Or a couple of times when I was reading about like the balancing the demands of roller derby and all the volunteering that's involved in it as well. And I was reading that in your book and we were discussing it on our Discord, our team's online forum. So I think it's a book that really speaks to fellow players and it's also a book that speaks to a lot of broad themes and sports, gender, leadership, organization, community. And so I hope that we'll talk a little bit about all of those things today. So I'm approaching this conversation with a little inside interest in this topic and some previous knowledge about roller derby, but when I first started scrimmaging with my team about a year ago, I didn't know the rules. Oh, I didn't know what was happening to me other than I was just trying to stay upright on my skates. And so I imagine that many in our audience today, maybe they've remembered roller derby from the 1980s on TV as most people will point out, but a lot of people don't know about the game and the rules as it's played today. And so I'll just start off by asking you both to talk about or answer the question, what is roller derby? What is, how is the game played? And also what is roller derby in terms of the community of roller derby? I'm looking at Amy because I think I know the rules. This is my seventh year playing. How do you, where do we start? It's, roller derby is a full context sport. It's played on roller skates, the old school kind, the quads rather than lines. It is mostly played by women and non-binary people, mostly adults, although there are also men's teams and junior's teams now. It is, there's no ball. The scoring apparatus is a player. So the entire time you're playing, you're trying to get your offensive player, the jammer through the pack, while simultaneously trying to block the other teams opposing their jammer. So you're playing offense and defense at the same time, which I think is very different from a lot of other sports. Yeah, very difficult. Yeah, yeah. And I think like you're saying, you came in not knowing the rules. It is also because of the fact that most of us come to it as adults. It's not like going to a kick-ball league or a basketball team or something as an adult. You didn't grow up playing this. So it's also something you're kind of learning along with everybody else you're playing with at the same time. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I feel like these visuals always helped me. They say this is team A, this is team B. There are four blockers on each side and those blockers are trying to help jammers, help their own jammers and then hinder the other team's jammers because the jammers are racing and eventually they're getting points as they pass those blockers. So I think that visual helped. I had a friend who played for Dayton for a long time who described it as football chess. She basically said it has the contact of football, but also it is so incredibly strategic and that I think is the part that you probably don't even need to know your first few games you watch. But the more you watch, the more you'll see all the machinations of things that are going to our heads as we're making moves, little moves that have big impact and vice versa. It moves that don't do much. The first time you see it, it will definitely be a collective chaos. Yeah. Which is a lot of work, right? It is, it's wild to watch, but you have to give it a second and a third time because once you do understand the strategically, the micro movements, the physicality, the brutality, it's elegant too, like the state skills. It is just an incredible game. And again, played by people who are not centered in sports, women, trans people, people of the LGBTQ community, which is like the second part of your question, right? Yeah, well, I guess I have some specific questions about those communities a little later on, but I wonder, and maybe this gets at some of the history of roller derby and kind of what the organizational structure of it looks like, again, a lot of people don't know about, a lot of people know what the NFL is or the NCAA or whatever, but people don't know about Wifta. Yeah, yeah. So maybe you can give us a little bit of sense of that. History, where does the sport come from and kind of what is the organization today? Yeah, I mean, the thing I talk about a lot is that, if you go to a basketball game, a hockey game, whatever, the players are not the people who still do the tickets. If you go to a roller derby game, the star gamer might be the person who takes the track down that morning. We're all doing all the jobs all the time. Some people are both officiating and skating. Officials are doing other jobs as well. So like everybody is doing everything. And I think that that comes out of the history of derby and how the modern derby movement started, which was basically people saying, hey, this thing used to exist. Why don't we kind of do it ourselves again? And because there was no structure in place, just kind of inventing it, but also like not, it wasn't like, so it started in Texas around 2000 and it wasn't like they sat down and said, all right, let's make up the rules and let's make up a structure and here's how a team will work in XYZ. No, they started playing roller derby and then they figured it all out. And then other people started playing roller derby and I attribute the early spread to, somebody had a friend they went to college with who was in a different town or somebody's sister went to college in a different town and it spread to other cities. And then that also then became the formation of the WFTA, which was coming together and going, well, if you've already done it, why would I invent it again? And kind of like, we would talk about like, please do this for me, you know, we will policy for a difference, you take it, take what works for you and leave what doesn't. And then if you have improvements, let us know and we'll see if it works for us. And so the WFTA kind of came from meeting that larger structure. And again, we didn't sit down and say, here's how a sports organization works. And like, we should think about broadcasts and we should think about these things. So, you know, we ended up with like 15 years later, well, we kept playing roller derby and kept making what was good enough. So that's kind of integral, I think, to the sport and to the community surrounding it. It is DIY. And I think sometimes that people mistake that for amateur, we might be not a professional sport, but there are athletes that play at professional levels and then also are marketing, doing the marketing direction, running the Instagram. So I do think the identities of the people who play this sport have a lot to do about too. There is a lack of community support or is a lack of visibility, right? So it is both by intention and by culture, by trade, it is DIY. I do think it will continue to be. I don't know that derby would be what it is at a mainstream level. I don't know what that would look like. There is something really, I guess, I don't know if it's sacred. That's the word that immediately popped in, but just that like, we're doing this thing and paying for this thing because we love it. And we don't answer to anybody else about it. We answer to ourselves and each other, yeah. Yeah, so that's interesting. This is not something I really thought about much before, but I don't think this is much in the book either, but I wonder if you all have thought about it and if this has come up in terms of decision-making about how corporate to make roller derby or not, right? Like, if it's gonna sell, like what you're talking about is like, should roller derby sell out or not? Like, if that was on the table. But yeah, like, is that something that leagues have had to deal with, like in terms of questioning, like, are we gonna take money from the sponsor or that kind of thing? And then can you talk a little bit about that? I mean, the thing that immediately springs to mind for me is the question you'll get from the public, which is why is a roller derby in the Olympics? And there are reasons. And it was a discussion that happened at the WFGDA level because there was a push for a while. There was an international roller sports organization, I can't pronounce it name because it's completely in French, but overseas like, roller dance and figure skating on roller skates and roller hockey and those sorts of things that really was pushing for a roller derby. We're not affiliated with them. Well, they had very different ideas about what it would look like to put roller derby in the Olympics. And then this is also happening like, I'm gonna say like early 2000s, 2010s. When we began to realize that the Olympics are a highly problematic organization in themselves and the impact that they have on cities that they go into, they are athletes and people is not always as positive in what we see, you know, mostly packaged for the news. And so we kind of were like, no, thank you. So, and because I also know that for instance, like an early broadcaster, it might have been ESPN but I might be wrong on that, was like, sure, we'll put you on TV. Your court needs to be 50 feet long. Well, our track is 88 feet long. That would be a drastic difference. So, you know, we weren't suited for cameras and we're like, well, no, we're not changing what our sport is just so you can put us on TV. That's not really what we're here for. So I think, you know, that's the very highest level of those conversations. But yeah, each team makes their own decisions about, you know, if they're willing to be sponsored by various sorts of organizations or support various other kinds of organizations. And I think that that's kind of the beauty is we can all live in our own communities and think about the impact we're having there and make our own decisions about that. Whereas like if you are a corporate sport, that's being made up at the top and, you know, you have your, the spam car and NASCAR is always fine. I think that's right. I don't know why. If spam is here, I would love to be sponsored by the world. And what are you doing here at the library? Yeah. I mean, other than the slight time of talking about the Olympics, I don't know that anyone at that level is chomping at the bit to make us corporate, to make us mainstream. And I also think that culturally, it's just not gonna, there's, I think Denver for a while, talked about not using roller derby names, which is a real part of the culture, right? It took me years to know some of my closest friends' actual names. And those names aren't always television-appropriate, but they are very much a part of the culture. Like I want to know yours in a minute, but Denver for a while, they started using their last names and became very serious about it. And we're talking about wanting to be taken more seriously or wanting to be ready for some potential of mainstream visibility. And we're just not that. There's a self-seriousness in that that is not afforded. Like we're trying to have people who are not lifelong athletes, who didn't train and go to university to play a sport. There is no like child to adult roller derby pipeline until in recent years where they've started to be junior teams. So it just, I don't know that it's actually a feasible thing. And also I don't think it's what most people would want out of the sport. There are smaller teams and smaller spaces that they're not necessarily doing this because they think they're going to champs. They're doing it because they like to roller skate because they're looking for community and commonality. And because they're in a small town and they have ideas that don't necessarily have spaces for them to congregate and talk about. So yeah, I don't see us going corporate. I hope not. I hope not. Okay, that's fascinating. That's something I hadn't thought about before and I appreciate hearing about that. What is your derby name? Okay, my derby name is Hela Donna, number 304. Nice, nice, nice. I'm a big Stevie Nicks fan. That's awesome. And my kids are Juniper and Iris. So I wanted a botanical. Do you all want to talk about your derby names too? I mean, we can get there, we can get there. Okay, maybe now is not the right time. Maybe you have the question and answer session. Awesome, well, so I'd like to ask you both to tell us your story about what drew you to roller derby and how you came to the sport and you both have kind of different paths but some commonalities too. And if you could share some of that story with us. Yeah, yeah. I started roller skating at four. I think it was four years old. And Skate City called our springs on I think it was North Academy Boulevard. That's where we spend our summers, school trips there. It was like a cheap and quick way for my mom to wear myself and my brother and sister out. And I was really good at it and I like to go fast. And I always kind of just kept at it. And when I was in my 20s, I got married and I was not having the jobs that I wanted like graduated right into the excellent greatest reception or whatever and my brother was killed in Iraq. And that's a real conversation starter. I needed space, I needed something to not be thinking about that all the time. And I started exercising a lot and then I started thinking about how I didn't enjoy that. I went back to skating, started speed skating and someone at skate night told me about roller derby. And I was like, that's who I need to be, that's it. I can roller skate and I want to not think about the things that I'm thinking about or be in my head. And so this is who I'm going to be now. And that lasted four months, the first go round. So that's kind of how I got into derby and went hard, burned out fast. And yeah, it was wild. Yeah, I did not go up playing sports. I did go up skating though, but I was out in the Nellah know where a farm. So I grew up skating on a porch that was about the size of the stage. And I did see roller derby on TV when I was in junior high. There was a one season show that was done by the producers of American Gladiators. It was called Roller Jam. It was there. It was in 1900s. Yeah, with a bank track figure eight with alligators in the center. And they had hand roll bands, they had halftime and that was my thing. So that's why I started watching it was like warrant and poison playing on this thing. But I would keep it. It was on in the middle of the night after Friday night videos. So I'm really dating myself here more and more. But yeah, and so then like I did weirdly after I joined roller derby, my mom reminded me of this, but I had been the editor of the paper in college and I had a column every week. And I usually wrote at about 3 a.m. on Sunday night when the paper had to be sent to the printer on Monday morning. And I wrote one time about how the only way I would ever be an Olympic athlete would be if roller derby went to the Olympics. And I was like, ha, ha, that'll never happen. And then like six, seven years later, roller derby did become a thing. And I read about Texas roller girls had started up in Austin and read about it in Bust Magazine. And again, still thought that'll never happen here. And then I had a boyfriend of mine had passed away and I was just like our wreck that summer. And I ran into my friend Alyssa who I went to high school and kindergarten with and she is Foxy Force on a high roller derby. And she was like, you know, you really should join this thing. And I thought, okay, and then I didn't do it. And I think it took, so that was 2005, the week had started in April. And so I saw her like July, in January, I made it my New Year's resolution. And I think I finally showed up in mid February. And then that's it. I've been there ever since. So it's been 17 years, but yeah. So again, I thought I'd never be an athlete. And it was like, oh crap, I said this thing and then it actually came true. The stories are never short when you ask someone, right? It's always like a lot, but also like, oh, a traumatic thing happened. And then I decided to put on wheels and throw myself at somebody. Yeah. It's a very common, yeah. Yeah, I was gonna, that was where my follow up questions is like the common theme of having something traumatic going through a period of struggle in life and wanting an outlet for that or wanting to find a community. And I wonder, I haven't been with our team long enough to know how true that is among our team. But I think anecdotally, I can see that. But I wonder, is that, do you all see that as common and are there other paths? I know you talk about in the book, there are some people who are really great athletes who come because they're wanting to be an athlete as an adult and this is a space for them. And maybe they had no trauma. I don't know if no one gets through life without trauma, but. I mean, we went to, in Madison, we read at a Ruben's own book store. It's incredible and our speaker or interview, what's her derby? Hammer Abbey. Hammer Abbey, who's infamous. Yeah, she's famous for WFGA. Very pretty, yes, she's fantastic. And she said something about roller derby, people come to roller derby because they need therapy. They need therapy. And roller derby is not therapy, but it is therapeutic. And she's a writer too, she's brilliant. And I think that's what you see. There's definitely, if you wanna open this can of worms with the hell betties, you could. But there's, I think there is something to that. I think that we're adults that didn't necessarily play sports either, so we don't understand what a team culture is. And we're looking for community. And so, yeah, I think that's a common thing. I think there is tension when not everybody shares that, but enough people do, and enough people are dedicated to maintaining this space for each other, that there is room to talk about those things. And we joke about it. We have like a dead parents club. Well, like, oh yeah, your dad, my mom, we make inappropriate jokes, and it's just like, you feel, you just, it's a safe space. Even though you're getting hurt a lot. I know for a lot of those people who we did have who had been athletes, they reached a point, especially as women, where, you know, like, for instance, Phoenix Buns, who we talk about in the book, lettered in three sports in college, and then was out of college and working and still wanted to be active and couldn't go to rec softball. She was really beyond that level of just walking into a rec league of something. And so, for her, roller duty was like this grand challenge. She didn't know how to roller skate. She came in and was like, probably, you know, by the time she retired, was one of the best players in the country. But like, there was no other sport that was gonna give that level of play to an adult. I know people who've come in from hockey, because women's hockey doesn't have full contact. And there aren't a lot of sports that have full contact that aren't men's sports. So there's different reasons, I think people fall into roller derby as the thing once they hit it, yeah. I would guess that rises to the surface too, because sports culture is so masculine already. And this is somewhat antithetical to that. Or like, has taken up a space in the absence of something like this. So, you know, people conflate masculinity with strength. And I don't know that that is strong to not have space for trauma and talk about how that informs your life or the way you play your sport. Yeah. So what keeps you in roller derby after all these years? What keeps you coming back? And what keeps you, what has drawn you, you know, in the book you talk about COVID happening and how that has such, you know, of course disrupted everything. But just wondered if you can talk about like the longevity. I read in there that the average derby, someone said, well, I can't remember who it was, but said the average derby career is 33 years. And this is my second year. I thought, oh no! I was hoping to last longer than that, but we'll see. So, again, just wondering about your experiences there and what keeps you in it. The thing I say now, because we have quite a few players on our team that have been around for a decade or more. And Big Rig, who we talk about in the book as well, is I think around that, a little more than that now and had said to me recently, like, you know, when will you know, or like, you know, you're coming back, right? Like it's not, you don't make the decision about whether you're coming back and make the decision about whether you're leaving, I guess, is the way to think about it. But I was like, I'm still having new experiences. And like, when it becomes old hat and boring, maybe I'll stop. But like, I don't, what else would I do? And I think COVID really showed us that. And there was, there were people who, when the shutdowns happened, were like, oh, I have all this time that roller derby used to suck up. And then there were people who were like, I don't have a roller derby. What do I do with all this time? So, you know, and the whole range of between there, of course, but yeah. Some of those people took up welding. Yeah, yeah, on our team. But yeah, I mean, I think until it becomes boring or until I stop having new experiences, or I don't know, at the beginning, I said I'd play till I turned 35. That would have been six years. And oh, no, maybe I said 30, not 40. I said 10 years, but then it was like 40 would work and that was 11 years. And so I did that. And now it's like, I could go, I'm real close to 50. So I'm like, oh, I'm 39. And I think about four years a lot. And my body and like, it's fabulous. I'm not, the thing is like, the age doesn't bother me, but like my knees sound insane on the stairs. It sounds like something's about to blow. So I'm thinking, roller derby's played on a flat surface. Oh, yeah. So stairs are useless. I just, I think I'm going to do it. If you ask my partner, she would say, maybe next year is your last year. It takes up a lot of your life, right? Like it takes up a lot of space, mentally, emotionally, physically, your time. I'm on the board. I'm a part of like all these different committees. I help host the gala. Cause I love it when they're looking at me and I'm making jokes about my teammates. It's like, it's my space, it's my family, right? Like I love them. I love being with the team. It also, it's brutal, man. I'm, I don't know if I'm at my lifetime cap of ibuprofen yet. And there's also always a specter of certain kinds of injuries. As I've had pretty major ones. How many ankle breaks did we have this year? Probably four or five, maybe five. And, you know, you have to take those things into consideration. I think I will stay until it feels more bad than good. And I don't even know what that means or how to gauge that. I'm also in a different space where Amy has played at a really high level for a long time. And I'm right there. Like I am a swinger, which means I play for the A team and the B team. And the A team, our All-Star team, we have a wealth of players. And so where I'm at, I'm not necessarily needed, but I'm getting to a place where I want to be right there when we're kicking Minnesota's ass. I would like to be a part of that. And I'm holding out. I'm practicing and working. And we had a lot of rookie start this week too. We had a 21 person rookie class. We had 35 skaters and then we took 21 more. It's a huge class of skaters. And it's something else to come back and see people at that starting place and to remember what it was like and to also experience that joy again. Like the novelty of it. And then just also, I think it reminded me this week, because we just started practices again, just reminding me of what it feels like to really be in your body doing these skills. Like I feel really good that I can skate laterally and stop at a speed where I'm not in danger, but other people are. It's really exciting. So it's a hard answer. There's also the, just because you don't play roller derby anymore, it doesn't mean you're not a part of it. So it's like, I took a year off at one point and I intended to really take a year off. I was still in the WFTA board and I was like, okay, I got to focus on this. I'm not skating. And then I ended up coaching both teams that year, which was not taking a year off really, but whatever. But like I don't see myself quitting or like stocking skating and then quitting all the way. Maybe I'll officiate, maybe I'll announce, maybe I'll do coaching. Like maybe I'll just hang out and see what they'll let me do. I don't know. Our friend Chainsaw says she's going to disintegrate on the track. She might, but she'll play till then. I didn't know that was an option. That sounds like a good idea. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about shifting focus to the barriers. We've been kind of talking around that a little bit, but barriers to sticking with roller derby or accessibility to roller derby personally, but also in the book you talk about some of the structural barriers to roller derby. It's a largely white population of people who are playing roller derby. I think there's a lot of socioeconomic barriers that are involved in playing the sport. Ability is certainly a factor. And we also, I've heard that practice before. Every body is a derby body, which is such a, like, so wonderful to hear, so inclusive, so idealistic, but it's true to a point because you have to physically be able to play the game, right? So I wonder about your thoughts about all of those accessibility issues and barriers. Yeah, I mean, I think that's kind of, part of that is the other edge of we're in charge of everything is we're in charge of everything. So there's just the burden of having to be in, not just time-wise and all of that, but like we pay for everything. It's not a cheap sport to get into. You've got easily a thousand dollars worth of gear to get started. Uniforms, we pay for our own travel. We do a lot of travel. Insurance, if you do get hurt, the cost associated with that. So it's definitely, there's a socioeconomic area right away to getting into it. And that's true both at the individual level and at like, how do you run a team and how do you afford a practice space? And like, you know, we pay a whole lot of money for a space to skate in that doesn't have running water or HVAC. So, you know, no water, no heat, no air conditioning. And it's what it is, you know. But I think beyond that, because it is also us running it, it's who do we invite in, but the people we know. And so it is a very white sport. There are pockets of the country where that's not true. I shouldn't say the country in the world. It's an international sport. But, you know, how do you bring people in who aren't like you if you are the people who are in the show and the people who are in the show look just like you? And I think that that's kind of a question that's ongoing in the sport as a whole. And we don't have the answers to it. I know, you know, at the WFTA level, they've thought a lot about how to at least start some of those things. And like, you mentioned so many things in that. There is the money. There's different kinds of demographics issues and all these things. And it's like, you kind of have to break them all down. But how do you work on everything at once? So I know the one little tiny thing about that right now is that we got rid of the minimum skills test. So that like, you're not having to meet this criteria of like being able to skate a certain speed or something like that. Because we had people who would have been great derby players and couldn't meet certain kind of artistry restrictions that really didn't have anything to do with anything. So it's a tiny thing that we've changed that hopefully we can build on then and move out to these other kinds of areas as well. Yeah, I think people are definitely classed out. It costs a lot. I think that it's also an issue of if we build it, they will come like to be frank. I don't know that a huge portion of leaks are having these talks or thinking about these things. I think sometimes roller derby falls into a place where there's an assumed inclusivity because we are a very queer gender expansive sport. But like the history of roller skating in this country is black, like there are black roller skaters involved in civil rights history. And those spaces still exist. Those spaces exist in Columbus. If you go to an adult skate night in Columbus, Ohio it is mostly black skaters who are better than any roller derby player I've ever seen. And so there's an issue of, like Amy said, connectedness and who you know, but of leagues and teams having to do really hard work to be like, do we make this a space where people will feel comfortable? Do we make this a space where we're open and critical about these issues? And we've dealt with that stuff in our league. We have like Pan Train's in the book and Pan Train when she was a part of our league helped make amazing impact. We had massive discussions about whether or not we were gonna keep playing the national anthem all together and talking about, well, why do we play the national anthem? Or when we played international teams, they look at us like we're weirdos because the Swedes who clearly have health insurance like they're rich, but they're like, why are they plumbing us, we're nationalistic. So there's people like Pan Train who come in and will facilitate those conversations. That's also a lot of emotional labor for her as a black woman, as a queer person. And it's, I think teams are trying. I know our team is trying. I know that as black as Columbus is, it's an excusable that we are so white, but we're talking about it a lot. And we are involved in community organizations. A lot of us volunteer with efforts linked to the Black Queer Four and you should Google that and some of the incident with Stonewall Columbus and a lot of mutual aid stuff going on. In terms of physical ability, it's a whole different ballgame, right? I think, I shouldn't use ballgame. It's a whole different roller derby match. I know there are teams, I think Gem, maybe Gem City and Dayton or maybe it was even Burning River and Cleveland. Somebody just did closed captioning at their games and they had an interpreter. Can we wrap that up? Do you guys do that? Yeah, we played that. That's awesome. Yeah, we had one and then COVID hit and like we need to get on that. There's the issue of making space for the audience accessible, which you don't necessarily have a say in because space is expensive and it's limited because of that. So I think a lot of teams are out of place where they are needing to talk about and consider these things more or with Dada is already doing great work in trying to address these things. But it's like, how do we take this from the international center and get it out there? And that's the other thing about every community being different as well. I think, like you said, like it's assumed inclusive for a number of reasons. Everybody's in a different city. Every city has its own political climate. And like, while there are policies at the WFTM level, I know there's leagues in smaller markets. I shouldn't even say smaller markets, but like there are places that are less inclusive than others that are maybe talking to talk and not walking the walk. And that's just something we all have to deal with as we find it, I think. Do you know about the diaspora teams? Yes. Yes. There's a lot of teams. There are a lot of different communities and cultures who are like, okay, if I can't meet this space or have this space in my own team or in my own city, let's do this in some other way. So there's team Black diaspora. There's team Jewish diaspora, indigenous rising. And I think, are they going by Latinx or Latine? But one of our skaters is skating with them in November in Denver. And people are actively creating these spaces for themselves. And I think that's a really positive, exciting thing too. I would, if someone could give me a time check, I want to make sure we have time for Q and A and I didn't bring my phone up here. Three, 40 minutes. Okay, thank you. So I have a couple more questions. I could, the reason I asked for a time check is because I'm thinking of all these questions while we're talking and I can talk to you all for four hours at least. So I don't want to do that to you. We would do it. Yeah. We're in. I guess I want to back up for a second and talk a little bit about the structure of the book and the organization of the book because I've always wondered about this and I thought it would be really cool to co-author a book in the way that you've done and you also bring in input from the team. And so just wondered how you came upon that organization, how you decided which player profiles to include and how you figured out the structure of the book. I think it had to be collective. I think it had to, the form of the book and the content of the book had to match the form and content of the sport because we can't do it without each other. Was there, I'm listening to this podcast and they keep saying, there's no I in team but there is an I in indeed.com. This is actually just a long indeed.com commercial. We couldn't, we can't do it by ourselves. We cannot, there are officials officially in the audience. Final straw has worked as an announcer, right? Has written for roller derby sites. Taco is a prolific ref and official and it's just like, again, we're all volunteering and also paying for it. And so for me, it's really hard to think about the sport or my experience in the sport in an individual way. And I think that also spoke to my emotional experience and how that, like what I was going through my life that drew me to the sport, that drew me to the community. It just felt like it had to be collective. It's also my favorite word of the last five years probably. Yeah, thinking about it constantly. Yeah, I think part of the structure of the book also just kind of happened in that we knew we were writing and just for like, okay, how do we start this? All right, just go write a bunch of pages and then we'll send them to each other and see what happens. And then we got really lucky in that we were touching on the same kinds of themes and kind of realized that we then could structure it as a, not necessarily as a conversation, but we could kind of like have our own takes on each of these themes and we had put out a survey to our league and had them fill some stuff out. Thinking we'd have them write about stuff and we think everybody's a writer and they don't think that. And so a lot of those people then were the ones who ended up being profiled and then also trying to just get a breadth of people in terms of the history of our team and talking about the different eras of it. Yeah, and then like as we wrote it, I think the one silver lining of the pandemic I think was that we had time to work on it because we weren't skating. And then we also had to write about the impact of that pandemic on our sport. And so, yeah, we just kind of, we really got lucky in how it came together in that structure, I think. There was a Goodreads review that was very unhappy with the, I think, I don't know if the word disorganized was what they used specifically, but I feel like it varies. It's like playing Rotary, you don't know what is going on all the time. They just hadn't figured out the rules yet. Yeah, it was totally cool. I think that it's also representative of that time in our lives, where we turned in a, and it all kind of was happenstance because our friend Sonia used to work at the press, right? Samara. Sonia, not Sonia, he worked at Samara. Samara used to work at the press and Samara brought the idea to us and it all kind of happened really naturally. And then we're like, okay, well, think about this draft. It was far too short and we turned it in, January 1st, 2020, and what happened next. And so everything was chaotic. Everything wasn't upheaval and turmoil. And I mean, I'll read it now and I'll fill a little bit of that like, yeah. But I think it's fitting. It's on theme and it's our sport. It is. So my, I hope I have something to fit in two more like lightning round questions, maybe. One of my major interests as a scholar and as just a person, not just a person, but as a person is place. And Sam, you talk in a particular tone about Ohio. I'm a transplant to Ohio and so I had some appreciation for that tone and just wondered if y'all would talk about the importance of place in roller derby and how your team is connected to Columbus, to Ohio and what you think that relationship is. I'm gonna take this as the outsider. I'm gonna have to do that. As the outsider who trusted the native to get us here today and we ended up in some place having some coffee. I am not from this part of the state. I'm not from this part of the state. Ohio is wild. Are you guys all natives? Does anyone not? How are you doing? How are you doing? I love this, like this is my home now. It really is. I'm not going anywhere. There is such a weird vibe. This whole Ohio versus the world thing where I'm like nobody is thinking about you that much. Like, what? My partner is from Dayton and she'll we'll just be driving somewhere, maybe to the coffee. She's like, did you know this president and this president? I'm like, I don't care. I don't care. So there's this like weird, hey, we started a lot of stuff and the Wright brothers, even though it didn't make sense. I still don't know. I don't know the Wright brothers are here, but they were over there. There was like a license plate war about that. There's a license plate. There's license plates while everything here. And there's this like pride that feels somewhat unwanted. And then this like, this also pride in that unwantedness. Like, yeah, we're average, but we're the best at being average. It's really intense. And I feel like that really, and maybe it's also because like, I wrote the narrative, so I have decided. This is how Ohio, Ohio, or Derby is as a team. But there is this underdoggiveness that is really, it's cute. It's really cute. It's really, it can be a handicap for us. It can be something that undermines ourselves because we'll play down in a game, but then we'll play Minnesota and play out. Because we're like, well, we'll show you, we are collectively a very small team. Like, like you've got the stature. Very, very short. You should have seen us play Anchorage. Those people, maybe they have health insurance too. They're very tall, yeah. And the place of Ohio and Columbus particularly. Columbus is so corporate. Columbus is a sports town, but a very corporate sports town where we have been there as an institution and a founding member of WIFTDA and nobody knows who we are. They only care about the blue jackets and that soccer team. And it's like, you kind of forgot the big one. What's it? Oh, okay. I don't forget. I am a person that says Michigan. I'm not that Ohio yet. Ohio State, yes, the Buckeyes. It's just, even that aspect of it is like, we're kind of a big deal to even know who we are and Ohio State students are like, what? We would never flip a car whether or not you guys won or lost, right? It's interesting. The Ohio culture thing is something I think about all the time. Yeah. Do I have enough time for one more question and then quit Q and A? Okay, awesome. So my last question is, this is my other kind of personal interest, but I am really interested in hearing your thoughts about what you think the contribution of Roller Derby is to women and gender in sports. In this moment where we're at culturally, where gender issues in sports are so seemingly controversial and Roller Derby is a place that has been more inclusive than many other sports, and I know that's been a development over time too, and so, yeah, wondering your thoughts about that. So I was on the WFT board, I think when we revised the gender statement, I'm probably misremembering some of this. So when the WFT first put out their statement, which was supposed to be an inclusive statement on transgender athletes, it was modeled on, I think at that point, the International Olympic Commence Statement, which if you know anything about it is not great, and we didn't mean to make it the way we made it, but it had things like, if someone asks, you just prove your hormones, and it was meant to be inclusive and it was very much not. So while it was on the board, it might have been actually right before I was on the board, they did rewrite the statement to basically be, if you think you belong here, you belong here, which makes much more sense. But then there was work that needed to be done as far as like, because we're an international sport and different people in different countries are dealing with different kinds of laws, and even in the United States going into different places where we'd be hosting tournaments, like I think it was North Carolina when the first bathroom bills was up. And so the discussion became like, well, we have a couple options here. Do we boycott the state and not have our event there? Or do we try to go in and support the team we already have there that has to live with us and try to make it better? And so we kind of went to that, to try to take that tactic. And so there are things now when you host a WFT event, the venue must have gender-neutral restrooms. It must have certain kinds of, the security are trained on certain kinds of things about what they should or shouldn't be doing in those terms of things. So I think that we learned from what we did wrong the first time and then tried to take that and be proactive. And I think that other sports could learn from that, even if it's just from looking at what you've done and deciding, hey, we got it wrong and let's redo this. But I think even just the simple things about the kinds of things that go into contracts with venues when we have tournaments can go a long way towards supporting a league that's dealing with that, that may not have their own clout to deal with it until they're backed up by that larger organization coming in. So a small thing, but a thing, at least, yeah. So thank you so much. Thank you both so much for sharing all these wonderful, just education about Roller Derby with us today. And I'll, I think we have a few minutes if there are questions from the audience, we'll take them. Carpet Burns. Okay. So I'm part of the Hellbentons. Cool. And well, first I wanna know your derby names. I'm Kiegel Scout and I don't use one. My legal name is Amy Spears. People think it's a derby name. It's not, it's my legal name. The house is a derby name. Yeah, I'm supposed to have it, yeah. And I mean, I'm intrigued by you mentioned that the players are the ones selling you the tickets. Right. And you mentioned obviously the feeling of Ohio and the community. I'm wondering how you have felt that your experience with community building, how that's changed over the years kind of as an individual and finding your identity in a location. And kind of with the team itself, Derby isn't a national, it's a ten of lives in any way. So you're really kind of knocking on doors and hoping that people show up. So obviously it's been successful. Yeah. I mean, the queers in any city have to find each other, right? I came to Rollard Derby, I'll speak to specifically, like what you asked about identity and community. And I, when I started the second time in 2016, I was married to a man and had been with him since I was 19 years old. And I got to a space where I saw a different kind of love. It's not like I didn't grow up in a cave or something. Like I'm not, I don't call it a spring though. It's very evangelical and my family was always like, ally, but it's not us. And so you don't have a space to really consider those things necessarily, but also just to see it. Like to just see women loving women or trans people, queer people, non-binary people, just living their friggin' lives and wearing what they want and doing what feels right to them. And so when you live it, it's not either a thing that is for other people or a thing that maybe every once in a while will be on television, but it's your friends, your found family. It gives you space, I think, to be brave and start to ask hard questions or think about who you are, why you are and what that looks like. And then again, you also have that community where if that change happens, and I, like my partner is a woman now, there's embedded support. There's no question. Like my mom's probably like, this is recorded, right? I'm gonna say, oh yeah, let's be in Samantha. I'm like, stop calling me, lady. Nobody in my community is bothered by that, right? It's not a conversation. It's not an explanation or like, it's not a history, it's just life. It's just what's happening. So I think Derby, for me personally, especially when it comes to understanding my queerness or my political beliefs in the world, it has been a really important home base for me and a touchstone in all of that, yeah. Yeah, the first thing I thought of when you asked the question was actually kind of like the way we've treated our organization as a community over the years. And I can remember early on, because like when we started skating, it was like, all right, just gotta get to April 24th, 2006, which was our first game ever. And we weren't thinking about beyond that date. Even though we had five more games already scheduled that year, we certainly weren't thinking beyond that first year. And so I can remember our attitude at the beginning kind of being like, well, why would you leave? Like, and not thinking through the fact that like you can't do anything forever, right? Like, and we also hadn't thought about the fact that more people will need to join because people will leave and then you need to replace them. And so just like organizationally, there was this kind of, now it seems very strange, hurdle about almost gatekeeping. Like, and being like, well, we do this, you know, like, I suppose you can do it. Like, we didn't like allow transfers at the beginning and like all these things. And it was largely just because we hadn't got it through. We hadn't thought about the fact of, we have to think through all this to have it be like ongoing. And now like, like Sam mentioned, with 21 rookies coming in, like working with rookies is probably the thing I just absolutely love the most because you just get to watch them, like watch the light bulbs go off and the wheels turning and all of that and watch them learn about this organization. But like, you can't hang onto it so much that you're not letting them have input into it. Like you have to let them make it their own too. And I very much learned that at the WFTA level where it was like, yes, we're dealing with like these things that are ingrained and ongoing. And I remember having a skater came in from a league that was new to the organization and at the time I was working in membership and she really, she just had questions. And she was like, I'm gonna ask you this. And she was constantly asking me things on like, it's this way and I know you're upset, but this is this way. And I remember Bloody Mary, who was the executive director at the time saying why don't you give her a job? And I was like, oh man, this is gonna be just awful. But I did. I was like, why don't you come work in membership? And she really wrote all those policies and she made it work. And I believe she's still working with WFTA right now. And so it was like, okay, yeah, if you let go of something and let somebody else take a shot at it, like it's gonna make the whole better. So like I try to keep that in mind still of like you can't stick around an organization this long and not like deal with the fact that it is going to change. And that is what a community is gonna have to do to remain healthy and positive. So yeah. Any other questions? Jeff. So I just wanted to share. I know. I read the book and really, it's come up a couple of times his colorful names that I'm stuck with. I had heard the dance on reading the book and I just wanted to share everyone's. I think he's all came from the book. Crazy. Wait, Jeff, wait, Jeff, I'm gonna give you the mic. Yeah, you should. There's just a handful here. Okay. Grace Killy. No walkie. Swiss Missle. That was shoes from Denver. Oxford Coma. Good one for OU Press. Pippi Rip your stockings. Chew Blocka. Betty or not. Kitty Lickerbottom. I like to use. Oh, hi. And Frida Chillo. Yeah. That's the number one reason to join a roller coaster. I think you have to come up with the names. It creates quick buy-in. Everybody should have a derby name. They don't play. There's also a great Venn diagram of drag queen names and roller derby names. To the point where there is actually a drag queen who is named Amy Spears in Providence, Rhode Island. But I'm like, but it's my legal name. I'm so confused. It is really nice to be like at a public event and just hear someone scream Kegel. Or like murder. And murder. Murder. Chainsaw. Yeah. Yeah. Our coach's name is Blocka. And I think she was like with like a board that she was working at one point and someone like yelled at her from across the street. Blocka. Like, hey. I just think we remember Pippie Ripper Stockings is a wildlife biologist for the federal government. And she was at a conference in evolution whose skates for Burning River was also there. But they didn't know each other's legal names. So she was like, evolution, what's your name? We had a Hell Buddies kid come up to us at one of the library events we were at. And he said his mom was a skater. I think he said she was a jammer. I cannot remember. And he bought the book and he had to sign it. Oh, and then he heckled us. He heckled us. In my hands. Maybe sweetie's kid? Yeah. Yeah, and he was like, he was awesome. He was cool. He was a cool kid. Yeah. I think he's a current student here at OU. Shut up. I think he really talked about the pipeline in the book. So this is a fairly recent development. I just love to hear about how, I mean, is it active or is it just developing because younger and younger kids? For juniors? Right. Yeah, so. And then is there a change? Yeah. Because that gets into insurance and legality and like your legal adult now. So there is a Junior River to the association. And I don't know how many teens they have now. I'm a little out of the loop on that. There was a team in Columbus for a while. It was not affiliated with our league. And we do have one skater right now who aged up from that. So when she turned 18, she actually went and played in a league that was out in Mount Vernon, Ohio for a minute and then came to us. But I think that what happened with that one was once the people who were running it, their kids aged up, then it kind of fell apart at that point. But it's a lot more viable in a lot of other cities. And it tends to be you play until you're 18 and then you graduate to the adult league. And that, you know, there are players who are literally 20 years younger than me who have as much experience playing because of the fact that they've played since they're like nine. So yeah, it's wild. But it's different in every city. Like there's a huge juniors league, Pacific Northwest, California a lot. There was actually Latin Michigan. Portland has a huge brocette league, Denver. It's just capacity and money to you. Like Portland's membership is 500 people, I think. You make it bigger every time. I think it's like two. I think it's like five thousand people. It's like, if that's men's, women's, kids, I swear, like everything. I swear it was 500 last time I went. I think it's three. It might be three. And they just, they have the money and enough people that can volunteer to do those roles and we're so small. It's capacity too. It's capacity, absolutely. Like a player might have children and want their kids to be able to play, but they're also actually actively playing. That's really hard to then also be in charge of this other whole team that's a different organization. That's one of our cameras. Cause her kids play and there's a Cincinnati team. There's a Cincinnati juniors team and she coaches and then plays for us. And lives in Dayton. And lives in Dayton. So her whole life is roller derby, yeah. Yeah. Any other final questions? No problem. Just back to the name of the conversation. I'm curious, I don't know if you talked about this, like why you choose your like government name or like a dirty name and talk about it? Yeah, so I was Allie Catraz for the first three years I played. She was a prison escape artist because at the time you didn't just choose a name. You created a story. And I kept the number. My number is 1098 and that is police code. 1098 is a prison break. Reported. Are you a cop? Who knows. No. Good morning. You can't tell me who. But I have this weird thing happen. It actually was a specific like moment in time that I made the final decision. Like there was the Denver thing happening. There were kill box who played in Detroit. Sarah Hypo had changed her legal name and I had been kind of toying with it. And I had this thing happen. I worked for the state retirement system. And when I left there, the IT director who I was pretty close with, like we would go to concerts and stuff together, I said to him, you know, you should really bring your daughter to a role in a dirty game sometime. And his response was really weird. It was like, oh no, I won't be doing that. And I thought about it. And I realized that because he do, I skated under this fake name that he thought it was like scandalous. And like it was burlesque or stripping or something like that. And I was like, oh, huh, interesting. And that was kind of the final straw that I was like, I'm just gonna use my real name. That's fine. That's fine. That's fine. That's fine. No, I won't take your name. But yeah. And then I repeatedly had people just assume it's a dirty name and some sort of Britney Spears joke. And yeah, it's not. Really? I don't get it. I'm the one who's saying that. Cause they're like, oh, I love your Derby name. I'm like, but I love that name. Why do you love it? Well, Sam Tucker, Amy Spears, thank you so much for your time today and being here with us. And again, little professors over here to sell books afterwards. And I imagine you might sign a copy if you wanted to. And thank you all for being here too. Come to the Appalachian Hell Buddies next last of our season home bout October 21st. Flyer up here. Brotherhood. I am not jamming, but Trickster over here will be jamming. Burns will be blocking with me. And we're gonna, my two goals are always to have fun and no banger injuries. So I'm hoping for to do that. What are you saying? Chemical Valid roller girl. No, I don't actually know. But is that a thing? They're Charles, what's Charles doing? Oh, yes. Crew laid, yeah. Okay, I know what to look for.