“Support each other, assholes!” Beth Amphetamine yells. It’s the end of a sweaty August practice for the Windy City Rollers All-Stars, and the hawkeyed cocaptain is giving her teammates her idea of a pep talk.
The All-Stars are used to laughing. It’s easy to laugh when you’re winning. Off the track, they’re lawyers, research analysts for unions, clerks at Whole Foods. On the track, they’re speed demons and monster blockers who’ve defeated nearly every top derby team among the 98 leagues in the national Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA, or “wooft-dah,” for short). In September they won the North Central regional tournament for the second consecutive year. Their roster boasts two competitive indoor speed skaters—Beth (aka Lucinda Scharbach) and Kola Loka (Dakota Prosch). And they’re one of only three teams that’ve made it to nationals every year for the last three years.
But in the western style, skaters in the pack move at a snail’s pace, stand almost completely still, or even skate backward. Besides really messing with competitors used to a high-speed game, these techniques outrage derby purists, who feel they transform an intensely physical contact sport into a mind-numbing exercise in strategy.
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But if the Windy City Rollers All-Stars want a shot at the national championships—to be held in Chicago at the UIC Pavilion the first weekend in November—they’re going to have to figure out how to contend with the western style.
(Not that derby still doesn’t attract its share of skeptics. “They don’t take us seriously because we don’t have penises,” cracks Barbara Brawlters, a skater for one of the Windy City home teams. “And strap-ons don’t count.”)
At the afterparty, one fan delivers the ultimate denouncement of the bout: “It was like going to a Cubs game.”
“We went through years when we didn’t lose games, or we lost maybe one game,” Varla says. “Now we’re losing games, and we lost significantly. This year has seen our two biggest losses, I think, ever.
