Portland’s Rose City Rollers clinch fifth global title and celebrate their 20th anniversary

In early November, more than a dozen of the best roller derby teams from around the world made their way to Portland to compete in the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association global championships. Teams came from all across the U.S. plus as far away as France and Australia. It was hosted by Portland’s own Rose City Rollers, an iconic nonprofit that helped shape modern roller derby and this year is celebrating its 20th anniversary.

After three days, the bracket-style tournament came down to a heated back-and-forth bout between Wheels Of Justice – the Rose City Rollers all-star travel team – and the Arch Rival All-Stars from St. Louis, Missouri. After 60 minutes of game play, the Rose City Rollers prevailed, taking home their fifth WFTDA global championship win and solidifying themselves as roller derby royalty.

Kim Stegeman is the executive director and founder of Rose City Rollers, but most of the derby world knows her as “Rocket Mean”. She sat down with OPB’s “All Things Considered” host Crystal Ligori to talk about the championship and the legacy of roller derby in Oregon.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Crystal Ligori: Can we start with a little history lesson? It’s my understanding that the Rose City Rollers is a team that was foundational to modern roller derby.

Kim Stegeman: In 2004, me and some friends were talking one night at a club and one of [them] was my friend Jeffrey Wonderful. Jeffrey was part of Portland Organic Wrestling and he did like rock operas and was very theatrical. He was like, “I want to start a roller derby team” and I grew up at a roller rink, worked at a roller rink for all my teen years. I was like, “Uh, yeah! A sport on skates? I can totally do that.” So we kind of started from there and I feel like, much like currently, we didn’t really realize it but we were all seeking community. A lot of us that came to it were early in our careers and we were looking for some kind of really fun outlet that was physical. Tackling our friends on roller skates and then drinking beers, sounded like the perfect combination of things.

I think Portland was a perfect place for it. You had a lot of wild, fun folks in Portland doing great things in art and music and at the time, Portland was still really affordable where you could have lots of hobbies because you didn’t have to work a full time job. At our first meeting, there was at least 60 people. In other leagues in other states, you’ll have a league that their entire size is 60 people. Rose City Rollers currently has 420 people, at our peak before COVID, we were like 550 people. We’ve always been one of the biggest leagues in the world.

So all these leagues started springing up and there was a skater out of Texas named Hydra and she started a forum. We all started talking and then we got together in 2005 in a hotel room in Chicago and we formed the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association. This was really the kicking off of a formalized derby and really it was, “hey, let’s get standardized rules” was kind of the first thing. So we’re all playing the same game. It’s grown from there and it became an international organization with more than 450 leagues worldwide.

Ligori: For folks who have never seen a bout, can you explain what gameplay is like?

Stegeman: Our iteration of roller derby is on a flat track. There’s two teams, each team has five players on it. One player on each team has a star on their hat; They are the jammer. The other four players per team are called the blockers. Now, the blockers play both offense and defense and so all of those eight blockers together make up what is called the pack. So the goal of the jammers is to race around the track at a speed faster than the pack and then they’re gonna get one point per member of the opposing hips of the other team that they pass for a maximum of four points per pass.

Basically jammers are trying to fight their way through the pack. Blockers are trying to help their jammer and stop the other team’s jammer. There’s a lot of rules because, by definition, tackling people on roller skates is fairly dangerous. Really the first time you see roller derby you should try to sit with somebody who’s seen the game before so they can tell you what’s going on and if it becomes looking like a big swirly mess, refocus your eyes on the jammer. If something amazing happens, you just yell “What happened?” and there’s gonna be somebody from derby within like 3 feet of you who’s gonna tell you, and they’re gonna be very excited to tell you.

Ligori: The Rose City Rollers celebrated their 20th anniversary this season. How has derby changed over the last two decades?

Stegeman: From a fan perspective and from a skater perspective, the game has changed in terms of strategy because the rules have evolved year-over-year. In the beginning, we barely knew what we were doing. If we were trying to go after a jammer, we were basically diving through the air, trying to tackle the jammer. Nowadays, it’s a lot more about strategy, about being where you’re supposed to be and working as a tripod with your other blockers. Jammers [now] are just so much more nimble than we were in my generation. Like, there wasn’t a lot of skating backwards when I played, but now when it comes to the athletic side of it, you’ve got to be able to skate forward, backward, go across the track side to side really quickly, be able to know where the lines on the track are without looking down. I mean, I wouldn’t make the All Star team if I tried it nowadays, but I was definitely on it back in the day.

So strategy looks different, gameplay looks different. We are also 501(c)(3) nonprofit and we have definitely grown as an organization. We started with a handful of folks paying dues in order just to be able to rent our practice facilities. We’re currently like a $1.3 million nonprofit, so from a business perspective we have grown in immense ways. My generation, we were the fishnets and shirts where we wrote our names on the back and it was a lot less athletic focused and a lot more theatrical and tongue in cheek. There’s still a place for that in derby, but it’s definitely evolved, from the way people look, the way the game is played, the professionalism and business that we have in place.

Ligori: Last weekend was the WFTDA global championships. Can you tell us more about it?

Stegeman: So we had 13 teams in town for global champs for three days of tournament play. And in the end, yes, we retained our global championship title. So now we are five time reigning world champs. The only time we’ve lost champs was in 2017 to VRDL from Australia. This year though, [against] Arch Rival out of Saint Louis, wow, that last game was amazing. They really wanted it and we went back and forth with them, like them taking the lead, us taking the lead. That final game on Sunday night was unbelievable, the athleticism, the teamwork, the sheer determination. I haven’t seen that in so long and it was refreshing and awesome.

A lot of times the jammers get a lot of the glory as the person who’s fighting their way through and they’re seen racing around the track. But man, I gotta give it to our blockers. Our blockers did such a tremendous job and so did our rivals. It was one of those things where the blockers really felt like they were controlling that game. It was amazing.

Ligori: What do you think makes roller derby so special?

Stegeman: Well, I think there’s a few things that make roller derby a special sport. Part of it is the people that come to it. We naturally pull in people who are fairly DIY, unique individuals. And a lot of people come to derby who have never played a team sport or seen themselves as an athlete. So I think part of what we really get in derby is that eye opening awakening in people where they see the sport they go, “Oh, I can roller skate or I roller skated in sixth grade. And I wanna try that.”

They don’t have these mental barriers of, “I have to be at this particular level of this sport if I’m gonna play at this age,” which a lot of other sports do, you know? You don’t go, “I’m gonna take up gymnastics and try to make it to the world level at 35.” That barrier to entry is decreased by the sheer fact that there’s not a lot of like preconceived notions about who a derby player is. So I think we have a lot of that newness about our sport going for us.

I also think that a lot of people come to it because of the community that it provides. A lot of times people that come to roller derby have come because they met somebody that played or they came to an event and saw people and how our skaters interact with each other and how our volunteers run the show. And they’re like, “Oh, wow, this is a really cool community. I wanna be a part of that.” More than anything else, I think it’s the people that come to derby who make it so wonderful.