If you think of roller derby and picture a choreographed show à la 1980s TV wrestling, you need to get yourself to an Atlanta Rollergirls bout, stat. There is nothing choreographed or planned about the full-contact, no holds barred sport that is modern women’s roller derby. The Rollergirls are athletes, plain and simple. As entertaining as the bouts and their chosen names (Hate Ashbury, Rudy Huxtabrawl, Maul E. Cule) are, derby is serious business. The sport — played by about 1,250 leagues around the world — involves two teams of five skating in the same direction around a track. One player (the “jammer”) scores points for every member of the opposing team she laps. The other four women try to block the jammer from the opposite team while assisting their own. It’s deceptively simple but requires serious agility, strength, speed, endurance, and strategy. We talked to Rebel Yellow (aka Lee Duh), an eight-year veteran of the Atlanta Rollergirls and former Head of Training, about how these fierce girls stay safe and fit for their intense bouts.



First things first: How’d you get started doing roller derby?

When I was younger, I swam and sailed. I didn’t do any team-oriented sports really, but when I was in grad school in Baltimore, I had a friend who was like, “I’m gonna try out for roller derby!” and I was like, “That seems stupid!” But I skated a lot as a kid, so I said, “I could teach you how to skate.” She did not know how to rollerskate at all. And I was like, “This just seems like a terrible decision.” But I went to my first practice with her and I was totally hooked. It was just a done deal. I’ve been doing it ever since.

My friend did it with me but only ended up skating for a year or two. She got hurt a bunch of times. One of the things that’s very different now versus then is the whole fitness component of it and a focus on skating skills and technique. When I started, it was a lot more punk rock and you just kind of did it, so you ended up with a lot of really big injuries. People wouldn’t recover from them well. They wouldn’t rehab. It wasn’t quite as much of a sport, so you ended up with a lot of turnover. That happened to my friend, unfortunately. She hurt her knee and then she hurt her ankle and then she broke her leg. She kept trying to get back to skating for like two years but she just couldn’t do it. She no longer skates, but we’re still friends.

Y’all just had tryouts. What kind of skills does a person need to have in order to show up and give it a shot?

It’s gotten a lot more competitive over the past couple of years as derby has grown. We do two tryouts a year — one for off-season drafts and one for on-season. For the one we just had, which was the on-season one, the bar is a bit higher. You have less time to get up to speed because we’re trying to get these girls in to play this season. They tend to come in with higher skating skill.

For any tryout though, you need a certain level of speed and skating skills — there are a variety of stops that you need to know and a variety of agility components. You need to be comfortable skating in close quarters, which I think is difficult for most people. It’s the thing they don’t realize is gonna be hard because you’re not ever used to having somebody like right there, falling and doing stuff where your feet are.

We are actually a member of an international organization called the WFTDA (Women’s Flat Track Derby Association) — one of the founding members actually — and they, a couple years ago, started putting out a certain minimum skills requirements because so many new leagues don’t know exactly what they’re doing. It sort of gives everybody the same baseline, so a lot of our tryout skills are taken from that.

Once you’ve become an Atlanta Rollergirl, what’s the training like?

We divide our training into on-skates and off-skates training. On-skates is the stuff that we manage as a league. We have skills and skirmish practices for everyone and there’s an attendance requirement so we know that you’re keeping your skills up because honestly, if you don’t skate every week, it goes fast. It’s kind of like riding a bike. You can get back on the bike and you can do stuff, but the speed goes, strength goes. Skating muscles are not really muscles that you would use for anything else; it’s a weird set of muscles.

So we have a sort of league requirement for skating and then each team will have their own requirements. Our four home teams have their own practices and often have their own off-skates requirements where they work out together. Our three IL teams [the teams that play against other cities] do the same thing. I’m on the A-team [the all-star version of the IL teams] and in addition to whatever league and home team practices we do, we have five hours of practice a week where we skate together and another two hours of off-skates land drills requirements that we have to do every week, because cross-training is super important. There are just a lot of things that you can’t do while on skates that will make you stronger and better and safer when you get on skates.

For a lot of the off-skates training, we’re given free reign to do what we want to do. Everybody’s got their thing. Generally my cardio is cycling. Some people run, some people do yoga, everybody’s got their favorite. We encourage people to do 2/3 strength to 1/3 cardio, just because the skating is a lot of cardio. We need to build the muscles up as much as we tear them down, so a lot of the strength stuff is plyo or CrossFit or land-drill agility stuff. There are a lot of things that go into being a great skater that aren’t just skating: Core strength matters a lot. Stability matters a lot. Burst matters a lot. So those are all things we try to build.

One thing we noticed a couple of years ago is that we go in one direction all the time and when you skate in one circle, your legs will end up super-lopsided. You end up being really good at doing the things you can do, but the problem is that the musculature in your legs is so lopsided that you don’t get good support in your knees and your ankles. Because one of your legs is just way stronger than the other, when something happens, your knees and your ankles and things get pulled sort of off-balance unevenly because you’re not conditioned for it. So in the past couple of years, we’ve been putting in the work to make sure we’re balanced and strong.

These bouts are hardcore. No amount of training is going to keep you from falling at some point. How do you do that and not end up badly hurt?

It’s interesting because falls have changed a lot over the time that I’ve been skating, mostly safety-wise. A lot of times you fall and what you’re trying to do is just control your motion and limit not only the damage to yourself but also your impact on others. Falling small is the biggest deal. If you’re gonna be down on the floor, you need to be little so that people don’t all die going over you.

A lot of the knee falls have changed too, and that ties into fitness. When I first started skating, you fell and you just slammed to the ground, which is where a lot of injuries came from. You were standing up and then you got 150 pounds of person just slamming to the ground. Now we do a lot of leg strength stuff, and a lot of it is about controlling your mass as it hits the ground so that the impact is less. We do a lot of one-knee falls, which are basically lunges. They’re good for when you’re off balance and you just need a moment — you need to be lower and you need to have an extra point on the floor just to help get yourself back together. We do a lot of lunges because it’s not that the knee you fall on needs to be strong, it’s that the other leg needs to keep you from crashing to the ground, so a lot of the strength work goes into making sure that you can fall in a controlled way without hurting yourself. It’s difficult because nobody would ever do this many lunges for no reason, but it works out. It has really helped minimize the twisting injuries we used to see with falling, where you fell and you were not controlled and you splayed with one leg caught going the wrong direction.

[The Atlanta Rollergirls have a 31 Day Leg Challenge on their YouTube channel if you want to try to keep up..]

Another thing that has changed for the better over the years is that we’ve recognized that we’re athletes and started treating ourselves like athletes. We’re actually taking care of injuries properly and trying to prevent them. If you don’t take care of your body, you are that much more likely to get hurt. When you skate and you try to protect something, that means you’re not protecting everything else. It’s hard because we’re competitive — especially a lot of the girls who have played other sports. There’s this sort of “walk it off” phenomenon; you get used to playing while hurt all the time. We try to get people not to do that. I had a friend once who had broken fingers, and as she was falling, she tried to hold her broken fingers up in the air so she wouldn’t fall on them and then just fell on her face, and I was like, “That’s your face, come on!” We have gotten a lot better about that over the years. Now we’re like, “No. You just twisted your ankle. You need to sit. You need to sit and see how it feels. You need to ice it.” We have a couple of nurses who are in the league and we have a lot of people who are EMT trained and first-responders, so usually you sit, you have somebody look at you, see how it feels. Sometimes you might just need to rest it. Sometimes you might need a couple of days. Double check. Because anybody who is successful at this sport is generally a little bit stubborn, we try very hard to take care of each other and make sure we are not being stubborn, for our own good.

What are the most common injuries you do end up seeing these days?

There’s a good number of small ankle sprains that tend to happen. Occasionally, we get broken legs from impact. That’s pretty rare but sometimes someone goes down wrong and it happens. There was a period of a couple of years when like everybody was blowing out knees, but thankfully that happens very rarely now that we’re doing the work to strengthen our legs. There’s a lot more face-to-face blocking now, as we become better backward skaters, so there’s a lot more face-to-face contact and with that there’s been a small increase in concussions because of the orientation, but we’re very careful about it. A lot of skaters have started wearing face shields to prevent some of that incidental contact, and we’ve got protocols to deal with it to make sure that people are getting looked at appropriately. It’s definitely nowhere near as injury-prone as it used to be. When I started skating, every practice two or three people would be sitting out because they had tweaked something. And we all had like a bad knee and a slightly better knee, you know? It’s really nice now because you go to practice and everybody just practices. Nobody’s gets hurt, nobody stops. It’s nice. But I mean, there’s a lot of work that’s gone into that over the years and it’s definitely been paying off.

Bonus question: What’s the average age of an Atlanta Rollergirl?

I would guess that the average is late 20s, early 30s. We just started accepting skaters under 21. We have one skater who is 18. She aged up from the juniors and she has so much energy. I forgot what that was like. This is my eighth year, so I am like a derby grandma. I’m one of the older girls. We’re older than most leagues are, but it’s kind of nice. There’s a stability to it. It’s interesting because retention has increased across the board every year, I think because they come in with higher skill levels and athleticism. That makes it easier to stay. Our oldest right now is, I think, 47. She was a distance runner before she was a Rollergirl. She’s in ridiculously good shape. We had a Rollergirl who was 51. She retired two years ago. She was amazing, an all star. She actually tore her ACL and they told her she didn’t need to fix it because she had SO much muscle in her legs that it stabilized her knee. It was crazy. But she was fine.

Keep up with the Atlanta Rollergirls on Facebook Flickr , or YouTube , but more importantly, get yourself to a bout to see the action in person at the Yaarab Shrine Center (400 Ponce de Leon Avenue in Midtown). Your next chance is March 21, when our hometown heroes will take on the Jacksonville Rollergirls.