Roller derby returns to Columbus area after five-year hiatus. Here’s how to watch
Their nicknames are as tame as “Hot Wheels” and as titillating as “Morgazmic,” but regardless of your tolerance for double entendre, this much is clear about the Muscogee Roller Girls:
They’re back.
After a five-year hiatus, due to trying to find a new home and having to shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, the only roller derby team in the Columbus area is scheduled to compete in its first home bout of the season this week.
The Muscogee Roller Girls will play a team from Montgomery, Alabama, starting at 5 p.m. on April 22, in the Harris County Community Center, 7509 Highway 116.
“If you’ve never seen it before, you have to see it just one time, at least,” Muscogee Roller Girls captain and vice president Kylie Morales told the Ledger-Enquirer. “Then you’ll see it, and you’ll want to keep seeing it.”
Laura Jordan, the team’s coordinator and marketing/public relations chair, told the L-E competing in front of their fans will “mean a lot. … Of course, we want to win. But being able to get together and play — and play a competitive sport again, a full contact sport where we’re not expected to have face masks on and that sort of thing — it’s going to be awesome.”
Tickets, available at the door, are $15. Admission for children ages 5 and younger is free. Food trucks will be on site. Fans are encouraged to wear green to support the home team. After the bout, the team will host a party at the VFW post in Cataula, 7379 Highway 27.
Roller derby explained
The Muscogee Roller Girls are members of the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association, headquartered in Austin, Texas. The association lists 428 leagues on six continents.
According to FlatTrackStats.com, MRG’s all-time record in 28 official bouts since 2012 is exactly even, 14-14.
Flat track roller derby is a full-contact sport played with quad skates, helmets, elbow pads and knee pads on a flat oval track.
Roller derby games are called bouts, divided into two 30-minute halves. The plays are called jams.
Each team has five skaters on the track during jam, which lasts a maximum of 2 minutes: one jammer, who scores the points, three blockers and one pivot, who controls the pack.
The pack is defined as the largest number of skaters within 10 feet of each other.
Jammers are identified by wearing a star on their helmets. They score points by passing the opposing team’s blockers and pivot.
The blockers and pivot, who wear a stripe on their helmets, play offense and defense. They work as a unit to stop the opposing jammer from getting through the pack. They also help their jammer get through the pack.
The first jammer to get through the pack without any penalties on the first pass is the lead jammer, who can call off the jam. Starting with the second pass through the pack, a jammer scores one point for each member of the opposing team she passes.
Penalties are given to skaters who block illegally, fight, behave in an unsporting manner or break any other rule. Penalized players must sit in the penalty box for 30 seconds, and their team can’t replace that skater on the track during that time. Skaters are allowed seven penalties per bout before they are ejected.
Legal blocks are contact with an opponent’s chest, front and sides of the torso, arms, hands, hips and the front and sides of the legs above mid-thigh.
Before the start of their home bouts, the Muscogee Roller Girls demonstrate a jam in slow motion to explain the sport to the audience.
“So it’ll make more sense,” Morales said. “Then, as you see it, then it gets really exciting.”
Not the roller derby you might have seen on TV
This isn’t the roller derby folks of a certain age remember watching on TV Saturday mornings in the 1960s and 1970s, when the spectacle seemed like pro wrestling on skates, with fights and other forms of unnecessary roughness.
“Some people might think roller derby is playing dress-up and just being that alter ego and putting on a show, when really it’s a competitive sport,” Morales said. “I think some people remember roller derby when it first started, … when you could punch people and kick them in the chest and purposely trip them, but the sport has evolved so much that it’s competitive. There’s so many rules. Once you understand how the game is played, it’s really exciting to watch, and it’s a very fast-paced game.”
The biggest misconception about the sport, Jordan said, is that elbowing is allowed. That tactic is against the rules.
“It’s not the roller derby you saw on TV,” she said. “It’s not staged. It’s an actual competitive sport that we take seriously.”
Jordan also debunked the what she has heard misinformed folks say about the skaters.
“There’s a perception that it’s a bunch of girls with tattoos and piercings and they smoke and they cuss,” Jordan said. “Yeah, OK, we do all that, but we’re good people too. … Between jams and at the end of jams and at halftime and at the end of the game, we’re all buddies, we’re all friends.”
All the team members are unpaid volunteers. No prize money is awarded at the bouts. The team is a nonprofit organization with members who pay $35 monthly dues.
They are committed to being involved in the community, raising money or collecting items for charities such as PAWS Columbus and Hope Harbour, and volunteering for Trees Columbus and Chattahoochee Riverkeeper.
“We want to show we support the community, so when gameday comes, they come support us,” Morales said.
How they started
The Muscogee Roller Girls were established in 2012, splitting from the Southern Slayer Derby Dames. Morales, one of the MRG founders, said they formed the new team to be more competitive.
The 13 skaters on MRG’s roster this year come from various towns in the Chattahoochee Valley: Columbus, Hamilton, Pine Mountain, LaGrange and Hogansville in Georgia, and Phenix City, Salem and Valley in Alabama.
Morales, 36, director of fraud and dispute services for TSYS/Global Payments, has been a roller skater “my whole life,” she said. In 2005, while living in Texas, she joined a roller derby league in Dallas. In 2011, she and her then-husband moved to Columbus after he was assigned to Fort Benning.
Describing her attraction to roller derby, Morales said after working “10-hour days in corporate America,” this sport allows her to “legally hit people.”
“It’s great exercise,” she said. “It’s great bonding. There’s so much strategy involved on top of the physical aspect.”
Sometimes it’s so physical, Morales has broken her foot, dislocated her jaw and thumb, torn her meniscus and rotator cuff, and sustained a black eye during a roller derby bout or practice. But it’s worth it, she said.
“Because I can’t hit people at work,” she said with a laugh. “No, because there’s nothing better than skating for three hours (at practice) and feeling like you’re going to die the entire time and how good you feel after that.”
Jordan, 44, resides in LaGrange. She is a recruiter in the foodservice equipment repair industry for Smart Care. She started in roller derby while attending college in Orlando, Florida, where she met friends at a roller-skating rink. They convinced her to try roller derby.
“It was the best thing that has every happened to me,” she said. “The rest is history. Within a year, I was the president and the captain of that league.”
After moving to the Columbus area last September, she joined MRG.
“I love that it’s so many different people,” she said. “There’s people from all different age groups, ethnicities, where they are in their lives.”
They also support each other, Jordan said.
“It’s so enlightening to be around a group that just wants you to be successful,” she said. “They just want to empower you and you to be better.”
Morales appreciates that successful roller derby skaters come in also sorts of shapes, sizes and ages, ranging from 18-50 on the Muscogee Roller Girls roster.
“You can be 100 pounds, or you can be 300 pounds, and not one is going to be better than the other,” she said. “… It’s very diverse. … This is the sport that’s meant for everybody.”
Jordan likes roller derby for what it gives her on and off the track.
“The physical exertion, the community, the friends that you instantly make,” she said.
Jordan also likes the teamwork in roller derby.
“You have to trust your teammates,” she said. “You’re only as good as your weakest player.”
Other than sprained ankles, Jordan hasn’t had any serious injuries from roller derby. The key to staying healthy in the sport, she said, is working out beyond practice.
“A lot of the injuries come from people that come to practice two days a week, and that’s the only physical activity they do,” she said.
New home found
The Muscogee Roller Girls rent the Harris County Community Center full gym for their bouts and half the gym for their twice-weekly practices. Their other home bouts scheduled this season are July 22 against the Savannah Derby Devils and Oct. 21 against the Upstate Roller Girl Evolution from Greenville, South Carolina.
Their last home bout was in 2018. They used to play in Front Porch of the South. After that closed in 2015, they practiced in Hollywood Connection and played in the Columbus Civic Center. But those sites became too expensive for their budget, so they played all four of their 2019 bouts in other towns.
Then, after shutting down during the COVID pandemic, they found a new home in the Harris County Community Center.
“This is working out,” Morales said, calling the facility and staff “phenomenal. … They’re great.”
New members welcomed
MRG, which has approximately 40 members, welcomes new participants, regardless of experience, whether they are skaters or off-track volunteers to help organize and conduct practices and bouts.
“If you come in and you’ve never skated before, we’ll train you on everything,” Morales said.
Skaters must pass assessments to rise from Level 1 to Level 3 before they can be eligible to play in the bouts.
“We have a lot of people that show up and do a practice or two, and they go, ‘This isn’t for me,’ and they stick around and become our volunteers and our non-skating officials, and they’re still part of the league and part of the family,” Morales said.
Jordan gets jazzed about recruiting and teaching new skaters or explaining roller derby to somebody at a promotional event and then seeing that person enjoy attending a bout for the first time.
“That’s really cool,” she said.
While the L-E visited the team’s practice Tuesday, Aidan Reese was there for a tryout as a skater after seeing MRG’s ad on Facebook.
Reese, 29, resides in Pine Mountain Valley and trains horses at Big Bear Farm. She also does stunts in the film industry. So roller derby is her next challenge.
“I’ve been wanting to do this for a bit,” Reese said. “Just never had the opportunity. … I figured a contact team sport with an added element of skating would be fun for me.”
Asked for her chances to join the roster, Reese laughed and said, “I’ve got to learn how to skate first. Then we’ll see.”
MUSCOGEE ROLLER GIRLS ROSTER
Here are the skaters on the Muscogee Roller Girls roster for their April 22 bout, along with their derby nicknames:
Christin “Chrissi Blocksberg” Simmons
Rhiannon “Devil’s Rhi-ject” Powell
Kylie “HandiSlap” Morales
Annika “Hot Wheels” Richardson
Whitney “Hurt Blocker” Hammock
Tammy “Lin CyKill” Denney
Morgan “Morgazmic” Nelson
Kaitlin “Shank the Third” Clegg
Laura “SiNnamon Roll” Jordan
Carilyne “Squeaks” Martin
Beth “Killer Bee” Kernaghan
Katie “KDD” O’Neal
Kylie “Double Dare” Mathis
LEARN MORE
For more information about the Muscogee Roller Girls, email the team at info@muscogeerollergirls.com, follow them on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok, and visit their website.
