Fort Wayne Derby Girls

The Journal Gazette

The Fort Wayne Derby Girls whiz around the rink, right legs crossing left ones as they round the corners of the Roller Dome North’s flat track. Most of the 10 skaters are beginners, many displaying the awkward knees and elbows, the teetering-forward posture of tentative first-timers. Occasionally, backside meets floor – hard – as one of the girls misjudges an angle and loses her balance.

“Get down! Push! Push!” Skating instructor Kathy Wall skates along with the team, encouraging them to elongate their strides. “Pick up your feet when you’re going around those corners,” she says. “Use your butt!”

“Um, she doesn’t have a butt,” team co-founder Danielle Abbott says, pointing at a fellow teammate. “I think that’s the problem.”

Wearing pigtails and a Rat City Rollergirls T-shirt, Abbott, 38, epitomizes the tongue-in-cheek attitude of the Fort Wayne Derby Girls. By day: a vice president of a local advertising company and a mother of three. By night: a corn-fed, black-and-blue roller derby queen known as Little D. Evil.

“No one here is a great skater, but that’s not what the team is about,” Abbott says. “It’s about career women and moms who need an aggressive outlet – something that may draw a little blood. During a roller derby bout, we can skate our butts off, throw a few punches and fix our makeup and fishnets without any guilt.”

For Abbott, the inspiration for the Fort Wayne Derby Girls happened during a trip to her hometown of Seattle in October last year. On the trip, Abbott and Fort Wayne Derby Girls co-founder Tonya Vojtkofsky caught the championship match of the Emerald City’s female roller derby league, The Rat City Rollergirls (www.ratcityrollergirls.com).

“It was amazing,” Abbott says. “There were 2,000 people there – a lot of them dressed to represent their favorite team and using homemade noisemakers. But what really impressed us was the diversity of the crowd. I expected just to see people our age, the alternative crowd, but what we saw were grandparents, PTA moms, children, fraternity and sorority people, metal heads. You name them and they were there.”

tags: roller derby, rollergirls, Fort Wayne