Windy City Rollers: 2024 Home Season

Windy City Rollers home teams started their 2024 home season opener on December 9, 2023, as the Double Crossers began defending their 2023 Ivy King Cup Championship against the The Fury. (Photo by the author)

Roller derby is such a team sport that both teams play offense and defense at the same time for the entire game.

The sport began in 1935, debuting at the Chicago Coliseum as the first Transcontinental Roller Derby with a series of flat-out races between two people, often a man vs a woman, on roller skates. In 1935, that woman was Ivy King (more about her in a moment). Roller derby remains essentially a race between two skaters, called jammers, but with four blockers on each team to stop the opposing jammer from passing through the pack while opening space for their own jammer to pass through the pack. Once they make their initial pass through the pack the jammers begin scoring a point for each opposing team’s blocker they pass.

A game is divided into two 30-minute periods, consisting of 2-minute jams, in which the first jammer to pass all the way through the pack is designated lead jammer with the privilege of calling off the jam before the two minutes are up; the advantage being that the lead jammer can stop the jam after scoring points; ideally, before the opposing jammer has gotten out of the pack and scored any. Meanwhile, there are rules and penalties for violating them — typically, thirty seconds in the penalty box. And while this is genuine athletic competition, and not your father’s roller derby of scripted fights and serialized pro-wrestling style drama, the sport has retained the tradition of skaters using funny names.

Not all, but many cities’ roller derby scenes are subdivided into home leagues of four teams. Leagues with enough skaters host home seasons, with a playoff structure between their home teams, a sort of “spring training” before their charter teams play other traveling teams from among the WFTDA leagues that have grown to every continent in the world (except Antarctica). The four home teams of Chicago’s Windy City Rollers are The Fury, Double Crossers, Attackers and Hell’s Bells.

But not only is roller derby the greatest of team sports, it is the one with the firmest adult grip on the handle of transgender athletic participation. Since 2005, women’s flat track roller derby has been governed by the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA), which grew out of the United Leagues Coalition, an electronic message board where the new generation of roller derby skaters in various US cities organized for developing consistent rules of competition, generally comparing notes and building a community to establish interleague play. And all these leagues are skater-owned, non-profit corporations. In 2017, the WFTDA Championship Final was carried by ESPN2.

The pandemic hit the derbyverse pretty hard. Some leagues shut down, but all leagues slowed down.

Remember empty football stadiums? Ball parks with cutouts of fans in the stands? Many a skater-owned roller derby league lost access to their roller rinks and practice facilities. Some leagues did not survive, while others merged. But, nevertheless, roller derby persisted. WCR came out of it recruiting, practicing and played a fairly full schedule in 2023. This year’s regular WFTDA season returns with a new regionally based international ranking system and championship tournament for the opportunity of one lucky league to again hoist the Hydra trophy — which has remained in the hot hands of Portland, Oregon’s Rose City Roller Derby, after they beat New York City’s Gotham at the WFTDA Championship tournament in Montreal back in November 2019.

The Windy City Rollers had finished its 2023 home season with the Double Crossers hoisting the Ivy King Cup trophy at the climax of its first home season since 2019 when the pandemic shut down the world in March 2020.

The WCR home season trophy is named for Ivy King, the star who wore the number 1 in (as mentioned above) the first Transcontinental Roller Derby event at the Chicago Coliseum on August 13, 1935. In 2005, when the National Roller Derby Hall of Fame celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Transcontinental Roller Derby in Chicago, Ivy King, at 89 herself, was there to receive a Living Legend award to honor her lifetime achievements in Roller Derby.

[embed]

The 2024 WCR home season began on December 9, 2023, at the McCook Athletic Expo Center (The Max) in suburban McCook, with a wild meeting of the Hell’s Bells and the Attackers setting something of a tone for the months that would lead to the Ivy King Cup championship finals at the Credit Union One Arena at the University of Illinois-Chicago Pavilion downtown. The Hell’s Bells led most of the game until Attackers’ jammer Mia Go Ham forced a lead change with about four minutes and change left on the clock. But on the final jam, Attackers’ jammer Nicolas Rage was sent to the box, allowing Hells Bells jammer Black Eyed Beans to jam to a one-point Hell’s Bells lead, call off the jam, and win their first game since the pandemic, 146–145.

In the next game of the opening night double header, the Double Crossers came out like a shell of their defending Ivy King Cup champion former selves. The Fury jumped out to about a 30-point lead that they struggled to hold as their jammers could not stay out of the penalty box. Still up 64–57 at the half, The Fury recovered well enough to come back in the second period to seal the win with a 144–97 final score.

After two more games the teams battled to a 3-way tie for second, forcing a round robin at the league’s practice space at the Fleetwood Skating Rink in Summit on Thursday night, February 15, to settle the standings and determine The (undefeated) Fury’s opponent in the Championship game on March 2.

“It was such a great atmosphere the night of the tiebreaker,” Hell’s Bells’ bench coach Code (formerly known as Code Green) said. “Each team was instructed to field their best team of ten and have any and all teammates there in team support roles,” Code continued. “Hell’s Bells played first and last. Our first win came against the Attackers, second against the Double Crossers. The last game was decided by one point.”

As in any team sports, rivalries tend to bring the strengths and weaknesses of the rivals into sharper focus, making each rival better. “The Fury are our next opponent in the championship March 2nd and there is a lot of history between these two teams,” Code said, “which recently includes more losses for the Bells, than wins. The Bells come into the IKC as challengers, having suffered a loss to the Fury in regular season play this season, and losing last year’s ‘bronze’ game at IKC.”

Last season’s Ivy King Cup champs, the Double Crossers were this season’s victims of the “bronze” game. Still, it was a brutally exciting game with seven lead changes, mostly in the first period. The Double Crossers battled back on the powerful jamming of Taco Bella, Shake N Bake, Natty Boh’ncrusher and Armarnageddon. But the strong and stubbornly coordinated blocking from the likes of Cheeks, Big Poppa and Malorticia were not quite enough to hold down the skilled jamming of Billie Hellish, Mia Go Hamm, Nicolas Rage and Ice Hurt; while Attacker blocking from the likes of Booby Trap and Fillmore Pain kept the Attackers within striking distance whenever they needed it. Right up to the last jam and a final score of Attackers-120, Double Crossers-108.

Lead changes also go a long way to tell the story of the Ivy King Cup title game between the The Fury and Hell’s Bells.

The Fury started strong, building a quick 13-point lead on the smart jamming of Braise Seitan, Big Bad Wolf and Blink 1Sk8E2, supported by the fluid blocking of D’Amanda Beating, Ginny Wheezy and Flo Rider over the first five jams.

The Hell’s Bells’ offense began to click as Tripp Hazard and Ficus earned lead jammer status on two straight jams, cutting the Fury advantage to only three points. In jam 8, Chelsea Dragger won lead and bowled over legendary blocker Flo Rider on the first scoring pass on her way to scoring 12 points, supported by fierce blocking that held Fury jammer Domme Draper scoreless for the game’s first lead change, 27–18.

From that point in the first period, Hell’s Bells managed to hold their lead from several Fury surges on the stiff blocking from the likes of Buttercup and Fuzz Kill and the tenacious jamming from Black Eyed Bean, Chelsea Dragger and Tripp Hazard, taking a score of 71–63 into halftime.

The brutal low-scoring trench warfare continued with the initial jams of the second period. In jam 8, Blink earned lead jammer status as Tripp Hazard went to the box, scoring 8 points to bring The Fury within ten points of the Hell’s Bells’ leading score at 104–95. The Fury blockers stood strong as the next jam went scoreless, despite two penalties sending Fury jammer Braise Seitan to the box for half of the full two-minute jam.

In jam 13, Blink earned lead status and made Hell’s Bells’ blocker Buttercup whiff twice, scoring 8 points. With the Hell’s Bells still managing their lead at 125–111, Blink 1Sk8E2 and The Fury blockers took control on a late series of jams amid official timeouts, including a technical blowout to the scoreboard and a wild flurry of penalties, foul-outs, and a penultimate lead change leaving The Fury ahead 131–129 with 77 seconds remaining in regulation.

Then, in jam 22 Tripp Hazard earned lead jammer status, scored four points as the game clock hit all zeros, called the jam and won the game, 133–131 to bring the Ivy King Cup back into the eager hands of the Hell’s Bells.

2024 Windy City Rollers Ivy King Cup Champion Hell’s Bells (Photo by Arthur Horino)

The UIC Pavilion General Admission crowd was on their feet for the final jams of the game. “One of several things that impressed me was that as physical as those games got, bodies hitting the cement floor with alarming regularity, no fighting broke out,” said Mark Hedl of Evanston. While they needed to learn more about the rules of the game, he and his friends “were picking up a lot by watching,” Hedl said.

To the Hells Bells, Code said, the February 15 tiebreaker was a literal microcosm of their Windy City home season. “The regular season for the Hell’s Bells started with a win by one point, and it ended with a loss of 3 points which, among other tight wins and losses forced this tiebreaker. These tight point differentials show how competitive the [Windy City Rollers] league has become.”

At the time of this writing, the Windy City Rollers charter team is ranked #5 in the WFTDA North America-Northeast Region.