Written by River Farrington
Art by Nicholas Ioannides
3 years ago I joined roller derby. A few months ago I stopped roller derby. I lost my superpower.
Growing up I found there to be many marks lining my body. Bruises of varying colors, cuts in places that seemed impossible. Mornings I would wake and my legs would ache and my feet would regret every step I took, demanding that I lay down. This was how I lived my life. While this may sound terrible, I actually appreciated it. I wore pants and hoodies almost exclusively through middle school and the start of high school so when I changed in the morning and saw the marks and felt the pain, it was a reminder that I did something. It could be because I fell during theater, or I busted my elbow playing roller derby, or I ran a 5k, or I did anything that wasn’t nothing. My biggest fear is doing nothing. I couldn’t afford the time to do nothing so I needed to do something.
I felt invincible. I was this young, active kid making the most of the world. Any injury I sustained I bounced right back from. My mom would ask me if the bruises up my legs hurt and I would respond, “Nope”. I felt so cool because I “wasn’t like other people”. Which is probably cliche but I wouldn’t be honest if said it any other way. I believed my tolerance for pain was limitless.
I started roller derby around the November of tenth grade. My stepsister had been playing derby for some amount of time. I held little interest. On a Wednesday, I was with my mom when we picked her up. As my eyes set upon the track my first thought was: “That could be cool”.
By Thursday night I was signed up. Saturday I was at practice. I had only been on roller skates twice prior in my life, both with balance supports while at a crappy birthday local. I was way out of my depth, falling on my butt all while I looked around and my vision was populated by eight year olds that were skating better than I could ever dream. They were rather intimidating. Even still at the end of practice I was with my coach and my mom and told her I was going to stick with it. As I was making my declaration, my coach eyed that my helmet was off with my skates still on. I still had much to learn.
For the first three or so practices I worked with a coach by my side, trying my hardest to get this skating thing down. Peering off to my right I observed the level 2 team. The track they were playing on was an oval shape with four blockers forming a triangle as another player made their best effort to get past. The scoreboard would tick up by four whenever the triangle was bested. It couldn’t be that hard to pick up.
I started in level 1. I was only taught the basic skating fundamentals. Unlike what I saw in level 2, we weren’t allowed to touch each other, which meant I had to use my presence to block others. As time moved forward, I started to feel a bond between the skates and myself, maneuvering around players with ease, partly due to my larger stature. My coaches took notice and determined that it was probably time for me to move up to level 2.
Level 2 begins light contact. There were new things to learn like skating backwards, crossovers (a type of footwork for turns), and my favorite… juking. This was my play style. My coaches called me a “jukey jammer”. My affinity for tricking people in past sports like soccer had found its place in derby and was perhaps even more effective, as just a flick of my shoulder faked out opposing players.
The start of next season was my proper introduction to level 2 in the form of the Winter Wonderjam, an annual series of games with other surrounding derby organizations. Our team lost only once to Ohio– a tight game. The rest of the season we dominated any team unlucky enough to match up with us. I’d become one of our team’s most explosive jammers while still supporting the blocking front. I had found my thing.
September of 2025 had arrived and the last level of junior roller derby, level 3 was upon me. Most of the level 2 team from the year prior moved up along with our coaches. Collectively, we were determined to turn around the level 3 team who, up until this point, had not seen a win in quite some time. In level 3, there is full contact. A skater accelerating and ramming into someone is legal and encouraged, upping the intensity of the game. Practices became considerably harder but that was as expected if we were going to get a win. I was all in, giving my best every practice.
January came once again, and with it the Winter Wonderjam. Our first game had arrived. My stomach hurt before every game, this one no exception. The thick stench of gear and other players enveloped the room. Warmed up, gear checked, and ready.
My eyes locked on to the other team as they took the track. From the center of the track, coaches barked commands akin to drill sergeants. Their defense appeared impenetrable. It took only two players slamming their hips together to bring a jammer to a full stop. Jammers became consumed by the blockers, stealing any and all momentum the player may have had. But when I looked around, these players and they had air pods in their ears. Did they even care about the game? Did their coaches?
The environment was the same as last year yet I sensed a difference. An intense fear was developing inside me, one that I had not felt before. It was evident we were going to be pummeled. Our competitors would qualify for adult derby teams, all while half our team was thinking about their middle school dance. Lost in thought, I didn’t realize that the first round already came and went with a score of 20-4. It had been only a minute and we had too much ground to make up.
I lined up and readied for the whistle.
For the first forty seconds I had no way to get around the blockers. I was being flung around like a pinball. For maybe the fifth time I was knocked out of the track and forced to pick myself up. Entering back into play I see the opposing jammer speed by, making quick work of our team’s blocking unit. Through the chaos, I see an opening between the inside line and a blocker. I make a beeline for it. As I am about to make it through, the window is slammed shut. My chest makes contact with an opposing blocker’s shoulder. All my momentum is silenced in an instant. He raises himself, lifting me with him. For a moment, my feet are off the ground and I’m floating in space.
I know what’s about to happen but I take a moment to enjoy the view. My grandma came out to see me for the first time. I could see her in the crowd. My dad was next to her. This moment is fleeting. I can’t be in space forever. My trance is broken as I fall from the heavens onto the hard cement. My hip takes the initial blow with the rest of my ragdoll body following. I couldn’t get up. The sound of the audience, whistles, and announcers wrapped my ears in a drowning onslaught of noise. This was the start of a string of injuries that I seemed unable to escape.
The bruising that developed was pitiful in comparison to what later falls were going to inflict. But it was all okay. This is just the sign of me being active. I remained on the bench for the majority of the rest of the game. I watched as my teammates got beaten and battered in a game that was already lost. With an almost four to one point ratio, these players did not seem content with just a win, they were set on destroying. With less than a minute left our team was waiting for the clock to run out, we were done. The other team was not. I watched as the same player who checked me earlier did the exact same move to one of my teammates. They had to stop the game because he could have gotten a concussion. There were forty one seconds on the clock. They were two hundred and fifty points ahead. They could have given that player a concussion. As much as this game had frustrated me I couldn’t linger; I had to try to move past it.
During a March scrimmage I fell on the same hip I injured 2 months prior. I sustained a blanket of purple bruising that wrapped around my leg with a line of red and green that stretched across my side to my inner pelvis. It brought with it a pain so bad I was using crutches to support myself due to the bloating of my leg. I couldn’t bend it ninety degrees without some amount of pain rushing through my body. I’d been taken out of the game months later due to one guy’s stupid decision. I was frustrated, but I wasn’t broken yet, despite the pain.
After three weeks I came back to practice. It was a Wednesday which meant there was no scrimmage, just drills. However, during one of these drills everyone was bunched up and someone–I don’t know who–was tripped up and hit me in the head with their own, resulting in me on the ground. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t get up. To be honest it didn’t even hurt that much. But at that moment, I felt weak. My coach came to my aid along with our nurse which, at this point, I had been accustomed to since the start of the season. Nothing appeared wrong yet I dragged myself off the track as I had lost all energy to stand. It was just me and my coach.
“I was talking to my mom a few weeks ago and how she is so frustrated that she is always hurt because she’s such an active person, but now she can’t do the things she loves. I feel like that’s how I feel. I’m mad at the fact that I’m hurt. And all of this started because of the person from the K-County game doing an illegal move. And now something that happened in January is still stopping me from playing because I keep reinjuring my hip”. A tear hit my leg.
My head was down with my eyes entirely focused on the floor. I only heard my coach’s words: “River, you are playing derby. You are going to get hurt. Roller derby is a hard game and you are guaranteed to get hurt. If you think that you don’t want to risk your body anymore you are free to stop playing, but only you know how you feel. I would really love to have you in Hanover but if you think you shouldn’t play anymore then you don’t have to.”
The invincibility that was such a key part of how I lived my life– I had lost it. Or perhaps… I had never been invincible. Maybe I had gone through life up until this point with the perception of living as a superhero, and I wasn’t really one. Maybe there just had been no injury that had brought me to a point of breaking.
I did end up finishing out the season and I got through without incurring any more injuries besides a few bruises or bumps. I said my farewells to my team before heading off to college. I don’t do roller derby anymore. Maybe I’ll start again after college–who knows. At this point I don’t do anything to the caliber of derby and when I look at my body, there aren’t as many marks as there used to be. Am I not doing enough? I don’t see evidence of activity. Maybe I am not trying hard enough. I would rather do something instead of nothing. My biggest fear is doing nothing.
Though when looking at how I have been living my life at college, have I been doing nothing? I’ve joined clubs, written papers, spent time with friends both here and away, explored the city and yet – I still don’t see anything. My body no longer encompasses everything. I need to find a way to measure other aspects of my life and to be honest, I don’t know what it is. But I’m excited to find out.
A few days before the final roller derby game I had noticed a bump on my left hip, the hip that had taken all those falls. When I asked my doctor she said there was a good chance the bump will be a part of me for a while, if not my whole life. So even if I can’t see the marks right now, there is a mark on my side that proves to me that at some point in my life I went all out and did something instead of nothing.