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It was “love at first hit” for Jennifer Hodges and roller derby.
Hodges is the jammer for the Band of Brawlers. She loves nothing better than flying around the track and dodging the pack of raging women intent on knocking her off her feet and out of the rink.
“It’s all glamour being a jammer,” said Hodges, who wears a tutu custom made by her mother under her uniform and goes by the name “Jaden Blayz” on the track. Hodges is a part of Ohio’s first women’s roller derby league, the Ohio Roller Girls, based in Columbus. Since the founding of the Ohio Roller Girls in 2005, numerous other leagues have sprung up across the state in cities such as Cleveland, Dayton and Cincinnati. Hodges and her teammates hope to bring about the modern revival of roller derby, a sport that was popular in the 1970s.
Roller derby is a hard-hitting, fast-paced blend of “figure skating, NASCAR, hockey and football,” said Tony “Tank” Mansfield, a graduate student in art education and coach and announcer for the Ohio Roller Girls. Mansfield recently co-founded the Roller Derby Club at Ohio State to promote the awareness of and participation in what he considers to be “the greatest sport on earth.”
Hodges is a 2003 OSU graduate and said she always skated as a child. When she learned about the roller derby, she knew it would be a great way to get back into the activity she used to love so much. When asked how she came up with her name, Hodges said “Blayz” is like fire, fire is fast, and she is fast, so it seemed to fit. As for her uniform, the team wears a camouflage outfit with matching skirt and top in olive drab with hot-pink accents.
The game of roller derby is relatively simple. Each game, or bout, consists of two 30-minute periods in which the five players on each team form a single pack. When the referee blows the whistle, the “jam” begins and the “jammer” for each team tries to skate past as many women in the pack as she can without being knocked out of play. After she skates past the pack for the first time, the jammer attempts to lap around the pack as many times as she can before the two-minute jam is done. Other positions in the pack include blockers and pivots, who attempt to keep the jammer from passing through the pack, often with brutal force. Mansfield said he hopes to bring the sport of roller derby to the OSU campus and show people that the sport is not the same as it was in its original heyday in the 1970s.
Back then the sport was run by the same people who ran professional wrestling and the games were often rigged for the sake of entertainment, Mansfield said. The sport dropped out of the popular scene and did not make a resurgence in Ohio until 2005, when the Ohio Roller Girls had its first bout.
One big concern many might have with a sport like roller derby is the possibility of being injured. Roller derby has “about the same injury ratio as say football or hockey,” Mansfield said. “This is one of the most high-impact sports on the planet, bottom line. The only equipment is helmets, mouth guards, elbow pads, knee pads and wrist guards.”
Hodges said she has been injured while playing the sport, breaking her ankle in March 2007, but it did not deter her and she was back on the track by the end of the season in September.
The Ohio Roller Girls league has four teams with about 60 players. The league holds tryouts in the late summer, which are open to all women 21 or older. Women are judged on their athleticism and skating skills and are also given a personality test. “We really don’t have time for drama and bulls**t,” Mansfield said of the need for a personality test. Those interested in trying out or attending a bout as a spectator can find information online at ohiorollergirls.com.
Diana Link can be reached at [email protected].
