Roller derby, a hard-hitting, fast-paced roller skating contact sport, has experienced a resurgence of popularity which started in the early 2000s with the formation of amateur all-female leagues.
According to a 2019 Smithsonian article, while the “sport originated in the 1930s (and) its roots can be traced to the mid-1880s, when a growing interest in roller skating evolved into amateur races,” it wasn’t until the early 2000s that modern roller derby gained traction.
“Modern roller derby began in 2001 when a group of women in Austin, Texas, revived it using a flat track instead of the historical banked track,” the Smithsonian stated.
“The new design allowed tracks to be laid more easily — e.g., on basketball courts or parking lots — and less expensively, enabling leagues to flourish,” the article continued. “Today, there are more than 400 flat-track nonprofit derby leagues worldwide, organized, run and financed by the skaters themselves.”
Contemporary roller derby isn’t played like the entertainment-style rollerthons that were televised through the 1980s, with lots of hard hits and crashing collisions among the skaters. Back then, it was a bit like professional wrestling — a lot of the fighting was fake, but if the skates came off, the fight was supposedly real.
There’s lots of lingo to learn in the world of roller derby. There are derby names each skater chooses for themselves, pseudonyms from the tough like Whiskey Riot to the punny like Mrs. Boutfire, and the names of the positions each skater plays: jammer, blocker and pivot.
Each bout is one hour long and divided into two-minute jams. Four skaters from each team, three blockers and one pivot who wears a striped helmet cover, make up the pack.
The pack starts skating around the oval track at the first whistle, beginning the jam. Pivots control the speed of the pack and they progress around the track.
One jammer, identified by a star helmet cover, from each team start at the second whistle and score points by passing the rival team’s blockers.
The lead jammer is the first jammer to break through the pack legally — that means no elbows, hands, head or feet can be used — and has the power to call off the jam before the two minutes end by repeatedly tapping their hands on their hips. This is commonly done to prevent the other team’s jammer from scoring.
If the jam is not called off, it ends after two minutes. Once the jam is over, the skaters return to the starting line for the next jam.
Building a team in Oneonta
In Oneonta, the Hill City Rollers is the area’s primary team.
President Beth Ashbaugh, in her fifth year as president, said the “next team over is Binghamton, then Albany/Troy and Syracuse and Ithaca are the closest.”
Ashbaugh, whose derby name is “Shear Terror,” has been with the Oneonta-area team since its inception. Ashbaugh said that she is one of three coaches for the 14-person team. A team, ideally, fields 15. The Hill City Rollers practice every Monday, she said, with the season of bouts — derby slang for games — through summer and early fall.
“The team started in 2010, and I was actually in Japan at the time and a friend was like, ‘Hey, Beth, you’re never going to guess what’s going on, you’re going to love it,’” she said. “I went to the first practice and I’ve been there ever since.”
Hill City Rollers, Ashbaugh said, has long “filled a strong need in the community for encouraging people to try something outside their comfort zones.”
“It really builds confidence in yourself, and when we coach, we tell people, ‘Do not compete against other people, your only competition is yourself,’” she said. “You cannot compare yourself to your teammate. Everyone has different skills on the track that they bring, and you want that diversity, and you want diversity of body shapes. We don’t want the typical athlete, per se.”
Ashbaugh said derby demographics are sweeping, with Hill City Rollers ranging “anywhere from 18 to 56 … and we have teachers, we have nurses, we have mechanics. We get foresters, and I’m a hairdresser.”
“You’re learning how to communicate and trust your packmates to be where they’re supposed to be, to get the jammer through the pack, so it’s a lot of teamwork,” she said. “You’re grabbing, touching, pushing — not necessarily with your hands, but with your body — and it’s a really physical, contact sport. We wear safety gear for a reason. But the high you get after a game is incredible and, whether you win or lose, both teams tend to go out and get a beer.
“We may beat each other up on the track, but there’s rarely any personal drama,” Ashbaugh continued. “The team as a whole, across the globe — and it is global — tries to support the non-drama aspect, because we realize that, if you have that high drama, you create toxic environments and that’s what gets us all into trouble and needing to do this anyway. So, we’re trying to create non-toxic spaces for people to get their ‘grr’ out. We want to leave the rest of our lives and come here and focus on ourselves. The sport itself seemed like a great opportunity to provide something for people that don’t quite fit, but want to sport. It’s not for the all-American all-star; it’s for the housewife or houseperson, or the neurosurgeon.”
Meta Manchester, known on the rink as “Taser Swift” is a 37-year-old Oneonta resident and newer member of the Hill City Rollers. Manchester said that she was recruited by Ashbaugh, who is her hairdresser.
“Every time I went to go see her, she would talk about derby and how I should do it,” she said. “She had a captive audience and, after several times of her doing that, I decided to try it in September 2023. They had a new skater camp, so I went and it was so much fun and everybody was so supportive.
“I am a teacher and it’s super interesting, because everybody comes from a different profession and I’ve made so many friends,” Manchester continued. “Teachers have a lot of friends who are teachers, but now I have friends from all over, and it’s so cool. I found out that there’s a larger community than I expected. We have our team in Oneonta, and there’s a team in the Clinton area and one in Binghamton and Albany and a team in Elmira, so you meet people from around the state, and people will travel kind of far to go to bouts and other events.”
New skater boot camp
Ashbaugh said that new skater boot camp happens annually in September.
“We train people and we don’t expect anybody to join the team when they’re done, but if they want to, they’re welcome,” she said. “And if you come and you like it and you want to stay, we’ll do whatever we can to make you stay.”
Mentality of inclusion, without forfeiting intensity, is at the heart of roller derby.
A 2025 article at tonemadison.com stated, “Roller derby has been at the forefront of trans and queer inclusion almost since its modern inception in 2000. Queer and trans people have been involved in creating and building the sport all along the way.”
“It evolved into that,” Ashbaugh said. “The derby people were just a bunch of misfits that didn’t feel like we fit in. You get into a place where it doesn’t matter what you look like, what you wear in your day job, or who you’re dating and we don’t care, so we’re inclusive, take that.
“We will only play female or female-identifying, but we practice with men or cis-gendered people,” she continued. “They’re part of the coaching team and we invite other guys to come and play and there are men’s teams. We just want people to play the sport.”
And the sport is gaining momentum.
A March 2023 NPR broadcast stated, “Three years ago, when COVID-19 lockdowns began, the all-volunteer, full-contact sport of roller derby was among the first to shut down. Now skaters are getting back on track.”
“This is something we’re all doing in our spare time, for fun, and it would be super cool if the community would show up,” Manchester said. “We’re right at Interskate (88) and it would be great to have more community involvement. You don’t need to know much about it to come and have a good time, and we always have a band.”
“I do think it’s getting more popular and more countries are getting more interested and it’s intriguing to women, just from a female standpoint, that it’s an actual sport that women started in the 2000s in Texas — the sport we’re playing now, not the one from the ‘70s,” Ashbaugh said. “We want to just make it feel good and safe for everybody, and we’re tired of not having feel-good spaces.’”
Personal growth among teammates
The sport’s inherent inclusivity paired with the personal growth it cultivates keeps folks coming back.
“As a coach, I really enjoy seeing the lightbulb go off,” Ashbaugh said. “It’s watching people hit their milestones and the lightbulbs clicking and watching the personal growth of my teammates. Also, successfully helping them manage a hurdle and pointing out they couldn’t do that two weeks ago. That is super rewarding and it’s a little bit of an endorphin rush, strangely.
“(The hardest part) is overcoming your personal mental blocks to get out there on the floor and do something that looks slightly terrifying,” she continued. “But actually, when you’re in there, it’s pretty damn fun.”
“I still can’t believe I put wheels on my feet every week and purposefully run into people,” Manchester said. “I had virtually no skating experience, beyond elementary school birthday parties at the roller rink, so I was starting from zero. If I fell, I couldn’t get up; looking different directions was beyond me while I was moving. I still have a long way to go, but I have come really far in two years. I had to learn how to skate, and then how to derby.
“It is just really physical and it’s something totally out of my comfort zone, which is a benefit and a challenge,” she continued. “You’re learning a contact sport, on wheels, in your 30s, it’s hard. But that experience of trying something new and seeing myself get a little bit better at it every time has been really good for me. I’m the kind of person that, if I’m not automatically good at something, I give up. So, this has been a great experience of pushing past that. I always joke that derby is a metaphor for life. If you fall, you have to get back up, and you have to keep trying to get it right.”
Hill City Roller bouts take place at 2 p.m. monthly on Sundays at Interskate 88. For more information, find “Hill City Rollers” on Facebook or contact hillcityrollers@gmail.com.
Ashbaugh said that the team is “always looking for volunteers and non-skating officials (such as) EMTs to help the machine go.”
Hill City Rollers’ next bout, themed “Red, White & Bruised,” takes place at 2 p.m., Sunday, July 13, with doors opening at 1 p.m.