I Am a Roller Derby Girl in Honolulu

Injuries, drama, dedication, victory—associate editor Tiffany Hill laced up her skates to rumble in Honolulu’s fastest-growing sport.

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Pow! It all happened so fast.

One second I’m looking over my left shoulder (wrong way, in hindsight), the next second I’m on the ground. No worries; I’ve fallen many, many times before. OK, get back up, I thought. Only I couldn’t. I wasn’t in pain, but something was off. My left hand went instinctively to my right shoulder. It felt weird. There was a saggy gap between where my shoulder should be, and where it was. I officially freaked the hell out as I realized I had dislocated my shoulder. I heard the pounding of the EMTs’ shoes as they ran over. I struggled to catch my breath. The EMT later told me that I “hyperventilated back into place.” I didn’t even feel my shoulder go back in. He helped me up and over to the bench area. The crowd clapped as I plopped down next to my teammates. Fifteen minutes later, I was back in the game. My name is Scornful Redenblocker and I play roller derby.

I originally stumbled upon Hawaii’s roller-derby scene by way of the late, great John Heckathorn, HONOLULU’s former dining editor. He showed me a photo of a tough-looking derby girl he had met. It was fate, when I met Sylvia Flores, aka Tadbit Nasty, a few weeks later at an online news conference. She handed me her card, emblazoned with an illustration of a fierce girl baring her teeth, pigtails under her helmet, the words Pacific Roller Derby underneath. She  put me in touch with Pacific Roller Derby’s (PRD) then-New Girl trainers, and the rest was blood, sweat and tears. Literally.

Before I met Tadbit, my knowledge of roller derby was limited to the time I watched the movie Whip It on Netflix. Movie theatrics aside, roller derby looked fun (turns out, it is). It’s also one of the fastest-growing sports nationwide, with a thriving community in Hawaii. On Oahu, women skate for PRD, as well as the Kapolei-based startup, Aloha City Rollers. There’s the Maui Roller Girls, and the Big Island has two leagues: Paradise Roller Girls and the Echo City Knockouts. Kauai boasts the Garden Island Renegade Rollerz. We all practice outdoors, on basketball/volleyball courts or in street-hockey rinks.

When you think of roller derby, babes fighting in fishnets might pop into your head. Or maybe you watched the popular, WWE-style bouts with big, choreographed hits televised in the 1970s and ’80s. It’s still very much a contact sport, but nothing is staged, and its participants are athletes, not entertainers. You’re not allowed to skate—and wouldn’t want to—without a helmet, mouth guard, wrist guards, elbow pads and kneepads, all atop old-style quad skates with toe-stops. Most derby players skate on flat tracks, not banked ones like in Whip It.

Click the link to watch our roller derby video.