Cajun Roller Derby

Roller skates and roughness are all I knew about roller derby. It’s not one of the sports that people discuss endlessly. Sports don’t normally catch my attention anyway. (Sorry sports fans, but my children knew how to spell the names of stores at two, not how to keep score in sports.)

Our local roller derby team is called the Cajun Roller girls, and Saturday night they hosted a home match at the Civic center, so I decided to see exactly how much roughness can one manage while on wheels.

Thankfully, the match begins with an explanation/demonstration of the rules because otherwise I would have spent most of the two hours trying to figure out what I was watching. In a cute effort to help the attendees understand the numerous rules, the roller derby girls come out and demonstrate as the announcer goes over each of them. I found the demonstration of what not to do in terms of unnecessary roughness very entertaining.

Basically, a roller derby match has two thirty minute periods, with a half time show featuring live musical entertainment. Each period consists of many two minutes jams. Five skaters for each team are on the course for each jam, four are blockers and one is the jammer. The jammer earns points for the team by lapping the blockers, and the blockers try to prevent the other team’s jammer form earning points. Sound simple right?

Just like in any other sport, there are penalties and time outs and plenty other things I’m sure my un-sports minded self did not understand. To give myself some credit though, the more I sat and watched, the more I understood what was going on. I even caught myself explaining things to the person next to me.

I could see myself participating… if I didn’t have to worry about falling on my butt; I mean, the ground is far from my height. And though the rules forbid elbows and outright violence, those shoves look pretty hard. Not to mention the falls when they are pushed straight out of the course. Who am I kidding? I may have tried this when I was a teenager, but I’m content to watch from stadium seating at this point in my life.

I did enjoy watching it though, and I was only sad that not many people were in the audience. It could use more support from the community, so I’d definitely recommend checking it out. The local team is good, ranked eleventh right now. They dominated the match that ended with a final score of 192 to 63. I’ll definitely put this on my list of experiences to do again.