Big Easy Roller Girls have been jamming for 20 years | Entertainment/Life

It was one of those sticky Saturday evenings in June. Yet a capacity crowd had packed itself around the edges of a roller derby track in an unairconditioned, sheet metal warehouse near Alvar Street in New Orleans East.

The Acadiana Roller Derby team, based in Lafayette, was facing off against the hometown Big Easy Roller Derby team, formerly known as the Big Easy Roller Girls. The New Orleans club was celebrating two decades of existence, having gotten rolling — if you will — during the early 2000s

Regional, amateur roller derby was an early 21st-century phenomenon — especially after the star-studded 2009 movie “Whip It” — with teams cropping up across the country. But the sport seems to fit especially well in the eternally eccentric and performative Crescent City.

In ways, Big Easy Roller Derby is like a skating Carnival krewe. Players appear in several parades throughout the year, plus they donned horned helmets to perform as “rollerbulls” in the local Running of the Bulls event. 

The lure of the track

The trill of the referees’ whistles echoed off the warehouse walls, along with the clattering of hard plastic wheels, plus the hoots and hollers of the skaters and their fans.

The players raced around the track, collided with one another, and tangled into packs as they attempted to score points. Roller derby is a game of artfully thrown hips and elbows. It’s physical, aggressive, dangerous and “tempers happen” as Sarah “Goldie Knocks” Peters, a legal assistant, put it.

It’s not for everybody. Some players, Peters said, “have found their place here, but might have had trouble finding their place somewhere else.”

Sherri “Beatrix Skiddo” Montz, who’s been with the NOLA team almost from the beginning, said she wasn’t just a “rink rat,” she was the child of “rink rats.” Her parents met at a roller-skating rink, and as a teenager she got a job at the old Airline Skate Center.

Montz, who works for a conveyor belt manufacturer, said she’s learned more about life on the track than in the real world. Inclusiveness, acceptance and conflict management all come into play. Not to mention catharsis.

“I’m not saying I had anger management issues,” she said, laughing. “But now I get to hit my friends.”

Alanis “Jagged Little Spill” Stoner has played on New Orleans’ junior team — the Crescent City Crushers — since she was 13. Now, at age 20, she’s graduating into the adult squad. She said she tried swimming, soccer, volleyball and all the sports. But for her, “it was going to be roller derby or boxing.”

Stoner said the bruises on her forearms “are like trophies.” Though early on, her parents had to forewarn her high school that those were sports-related. Nowadays, Stoner said, “I just tell people I got into a fight at the Walmart.”

All kidding aside, Stoner said, “When I’m on the track, it feels good mentally and physically.” She said it’s an adrenaline rush, and some of the other players have become her best friends. “It’s easy to talk to people here, she said.”

In the beginning

Patti “Crushin’ Roulette” Rowsey, a bartender who was into contact sports like boxing and rugby, introduced modern roller derby to New Orleans. Rowsey had moved from the Crescent City to Austin — where the “Whip It” film was set — sometime after the millennium. She fell in with some skaters and soon set out to transplant the campy sport back home.

Rowsey said she and some like-minded pals spread the word in New Orleans, seeking women who were willing to give the demanding game a try, though “some of them couldn’t even skate.” Players from Austin put on a skating workshop, and the nascent team gained momentum, but Rowsey said, “We were just starting to get the league together when (Hurricane) Katrina came.”

Jeannie “Galaxy Grrl” Detweiler was in the original batch of Big Easy Roller Girls, after possibly seeing one of Rowsey’s recruitment flyers. Detweiler, an artist, said she was never into competitive sports, but she liked to skate and, for some reason, roller derby appealed to her.

Despite the profound disruption of the storm and flood, and the scattering of many of the original players, the team reformed. Sally “SmasHer” Asher, a writer and historian, recalls that roller derby players from Las Vegas flew to New Orleans to help train the new recruits.

Laura “Little Mascara” Hawkins, another of the earliest Roller Girls, credits Kate “Cherry Pi” Parker, a former math teacher, with bringing the flock back together after the storm and flood. Hawkins, who was a real estate agent at the time, said there was more to it than skating and jamming. They had to establish a nonprofit corporation, raise money and pay the costs of hosting and traveling to bouts.

The first official bout was held at one of the most iconic of Crescent City locations, Mardi Gras World on the West Bank in September 2006. A track was laid out on the hard concrete floor, surrounding the Orpheus parade’s dragon-shaped Leviathan float. Tickets sold out for the clash between two squads, the Ain’ts and Hornots. 

“That’s when we learned how important entertainment and revelry was to healing,” Asher said. Beforehand, she said, some players worried that the event seemed too trivial and disrespectful for the painful recovery era.

Changing with the times

Old-timers think the roller derby was probably more violent and more theatrical in the beginning. “There were a lot more bodies flying and hitting,” Detweiler said. This dovetailed with the scrappiness of the era.

Over the years, the sport has taken a turn toward athleticism and safety. Which might be for the best. Many of the originators report that they got pretty banged up back then.

The Big Easy Roller Girls settled into a groove, spending two seasons among the floats at Mardi Gras World, then held bouts at the University of New Orleans before moving into the current warehouse location. In 2022, they changed the name to Big Easy Roller Derby in order to better reflect their inclusiveness.

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The next opportunity to see the Big Easy Roller Derby is July 25 at the Big Easy Warehouse, 3632 Desire Parkway, New Orleans. The Crescent City Crushers face the Cyber Punks Junior Roller Derby from Augusta, Georgia, at 5 p.m., and the Big Easy Second Line faces the Montgomery Roller Derby at 7:30 p.m. The season continues through October, and more info is available at bigeasyrollerderby.com.