Sport may be serious business, but it doesn't have to be predictable.

The Olympics can bring up many interesting topics of discussion – issues of nationalism, elitism, sportsmanship – so on, so forth. But since the closing ceremonies, all I can think about is women in sport.

Just prior to the commencement of the games the story of Women’s Ski Jumping got some media attention due to it's absence at the games, which further led to numerous discussions around women (ladies?) in sport. As an athletic woman, who has had a lifelong love affair with team sports, I considered how the direction of the conversation could have an impact on my current sporting passion, Roller Derby. I was recently responding to some interview questions about the women-led revival of flat track Roller Derby in North America, and the timing with the issues raised around the Olympics crystallized some of my feelings around the current evolution of the sport of Roller Derby.

In the context of business, we talk about positioning - in order for a product to sustain some kind of competitive advantage in a given market, it has to service a particular customer in a distinctly valuable way. Assuming sports, in the eyes both our fans and media types, is a kind of entertainment product, the concept of positioning suggests that each sport should more-or-less target a specific entertainment market in a distinctly valuable way. The NHL is distinct to Major Junior Hockey, for instance, due to the caliber, skill and notoriety of the players. The MLB's season is from April to October, and the NFL runs September until about January, so on and so forth. The debate of how Roller Derby should grow/change, often brings me back to the concept of positioning, and I'll touch on this briefly later.

 Photo: Marc Santos

To understand how derby is a very distinct sport, it's worth pointing out how some other women's sports are not particularly well positioned in the sporting world. For instance, the distinction between Hockey and Women’s Hockey – is currently the gender of the players. Men’s Hockey is generally considered simply “hockey” and thus Women’s Hockey is “hockey” played by women (and there is no body checking). When compared to “hockey” it’s often slower and less brutal, and doesn't offer any clear advantageous distinction from the alternate. As such, Women’s Hockey, has poor positioning within the sports entertainment industry. The audience and sponsorship dollars reflect this reality.

To be clear – I do not believe that this takes away from the practice of the sport itself. As someone who grew up in arenas, ringuette and hockey provided me with an education in fitness, team playing and goal setting that many of my female peers didn't benefit from. I believe that this was invaluable to me becoming an out-going, assertive, and goal-driven adult. But I never had any misgivings that I could be a full-time professional player, no matter how good I was on the ice. There just wasn't enough of an audience to pull in the kind of money that would be needed to pay, even modestly, a 20 player roster. There still isn't - and women's hockey has been around, in a variety of forms, since the days of Lord Stanley. The world of spectator sports has not been too supportive of women's team sports.

 

Photo: file from the Wikimedia Commons.

These are important thing to consider as the sport of Roller Derby gains momentum and angles towards greater popularity. Two weeks ago my team played in front of over 2,100 people in DC. Rat City Roller Girls set record attendance the same weekend, with a crowd 5,158 for their home season opener. To be clear, these are amateur sporting events. Something is working to attract these large groups of spectators, and just as this is starting to happen - people are calling for some fairly important changes to the sport in a seeming attempt to make it appear more "serious." 

The people calling for a greater "seriousness" for the sport (for example, the self-professed "Real" Canadian Roller Derby Association) would like to see an end to the DIY aesthetic and the camp appeal of the sport, the often comical use of derby names (a Nom de Pummel, as it were), as well as the overt sex appeal of some of the players. This call clearly rests on a few important assumptions - 1) that the nature of sport is purely serious; 2) that these original elements have a negative impact the players ability to play the sport with seriousness; and 3) that these are superficial, unimportant elements of the game.

I would say that all of these assumptions are problematic. I feel that the nature of sport is honestly less "serious" than it is "masculine." Sport, contact sports in particular, are considered at their foundation a bastion of male masculinity and any subversion of this is seen as problematic to the one true nature of the sport. Overt femininity, or feminine masculinity in contact sports is challenging of this presumed natural state of affairs, and is summarily repressed, often through some kind of shaming. In this way, the culture of spectator sports is generally an incredibly sexist one.

Even sports where more feminine characteristics should be advantageous to the sports (e.g. Figure skating), are being twisted into something more masculine given the lack of legitimacy associated with femininity ("Skating is being straightened up. The straighter it gets, the more marketable its skaters become.") even male femininity. The quotation above is important, just in case you start imagining that a kind of swaggering butch behaviour in women would good for business. It isn't. Please recall, most recently. the "controversy" of the Canadian Women's hockey team's post gold medal celebrations. This is a double standard routed in sexism, and we shouldn't be using a sexist standard as a reference for the design of our sport.

Photo Jonathan LC

The cool thing about derby - and the thing that often gives it a third-wave feminist label - is that while the athleticism is of prime importance, we still recognize that sport is a game, a diversion, something that is done to build community and to have fun, and this is made obvious by the campy nature of bouts.While we love sport, we are not beyond making fun of it. Further, it's a sport that is currently largely run by and for women - unlike derby of yore, or other such male-oriented girls-hitting-each-other in skimpy clothing games. Derby is feminine, AND butch. It's thick, AND thin. You can be openly lesbian, but it's not generally assumed that you are just because you're tough - because everyone in derby is tough. Derby can represent all the complex array of things that women are in real life. And I wager that anyone who sees it as something else, is a) simple minded; or b) hasn't actually seen a bout recently. As such, I feel that if you remove all elements of camp from roller derby - you remove the giant poke-in-the-eye that derby gives the standard sporting world. If you remove the option of overt, sometimes sexual, femininity and you fall into a sexist trap that suggests that such femininity cannot be truly athletic - which is something our athletes disprove time and time again.  

Luckily, in a 300+ channel universe - there need not be a "standard sporting audience."And this is what we cannot lose sight of as we continue to build the sport. When I first started doing promotion for our league - I thought we should really try to appeal directly to Montreal's many pro sports fans - the people who pay big bucks to see the Habs, the Alouettes, or the Impact. This idea made sense to me only before I actually started playing, and before I got to know our very particular audience. At our bouts, we have an arena packed full of people, many of whom do not regularly watch pro sports. This great mix of people - hipsters, queers, young parents, urbanites, jocks, nerds, rockabilly-types and, more generally , a lot of women - are not being fully serviced by conventional spectator sports. We are giving them something they specifically find interesting and worth following. This is called a target market - and when you find one that is profitable for you, you try your damnedest to give them what they want. These people will not likely switch from derby to hockey - they would more likely pass up a  derby bout to catch a cool new indie band - and this is worth noting. They have very different sensibilities than do most pro-sports fans. I can only imagine how the amazing atmosphere of our venues would be different if it was filled with more conventional sporting fans. Our existing market would likely be really turned off. So we have to be aware of how appealing to a new audience may alienate our loyal fans.

 photo: Susan Moss

Fundamentally,  Roller Derby appeals to people who are able to wrap their heads around the concept of empowered female athletes. The balance between the overt machismo of the sport and the feminine nature of the players is really enticing to people who don't have a vested interest in supporting hetronormative ideals of what women are and are not. Not that this is how we sell it, but it just seems to be the case. So our potential fan base includes a really broad spectrum of people - many of whom have yet to hear about the sport.

I feel that people underestimate the size of this market, because they are not a conventional sporting market - and it's only easy to identify new markets retrospectively, or with extensive research. So, while I'm like many active players - very excited at the increasingly intense level of play within derby leagues - I caution those who think this means we have to align ourselves more closely with the mores of conventional spectator sports. We are not part of conventional sport. There is good reason the last word in the Woman's Flat Track Derby Association tag line is "revolutionary" - let's stay true to that in whatever unconventional form it might take.