With the way roller derby continues to explode in popularity and cultural cache, sooner or later it was bound to invade the academic realm. Well, at least that happened with the Oz Roller Girls not once but twice last week.
From left, Crushed Red Pepper, Kannonball Kat-astrophe and Short Fuze getting all academic on the topic of roller derby.
Three of our rollergirls — Crushed Red Pepper, Kannonball Kat-astrophe and Short Fuze — presented a panel (moderated by yours truly) titled “Confessions of an Oz Roller Girl: Sportsmanship in Booty Shorts” at SUNY Oswego’s fourth annual Sportsmanship Day Symposium. Our talk was in a late slot, so the crowd was modest, but audience members were very interested and asked many questions.
Clearing up the biggest misconception — that this is a very real sport and not the staged theatrics of the ’70s — was a key point, as well as the amount of work to succeed and the amazing sisterly bond among not only one’s own team but with rollergirls in other leagues. Since CRP, Kat and Shortie have been regular SUNY Oswego students for the past few years who no one would have taken as derby girls, that dispelled the notion this was a sport of colossal brutes.
The symposium’s organizer, sociology professor and prolific author Tim Delaney, planned to definitely start discussing roller derby in his Sociology of Sports class and added if a book he and co-author Tim Madigan wrote on sports sociology goes into a second edition they would include roller derby in it. Those present seemed quite keen to catch a bout, which could then help more with word of mouth. All in all, quite a win.
CRP and Kat also visited my BRC 328: Media Copywriting class to help my students with an extra-credit assignment. The scenario: The Oz Roller Girls were the client, and the students (in mostly groups of two) were creative teams asked to create flyers to promote our March 25 open house/recruitment event. Thus their task included finding out from the rollergirls why people would join, and turning the results into creative, eye-catching and accurate flyers.
The results of the student contest? Coming in the next blog entry. Stay tuned!
my strange journey into roller derby 