In a fury of faded, red-streaked hair and a star-emblazoned helmet, Las Putas del Fuego’s Stevie Kicks barrels into the backs of the Rhinestones’ blockers. The blockers’ stance, wide-legged and arm-in-arm like a rugby scrum on wheels, wobbles. The 5-foot-1-inch skater struggles to create a seam, derby shorthand for a gap in players, to get ahead of the pack. Her own team’s blockers are busy smashing fishnetted hips into the opposing Rhinestones’ jammer.
“The euphoria of skating in a bout and being a jammer, successfully jamming and hearing the crowd go fucking wild… ” Rhinestones member Jose Queervo shakes their head on the sidelines, sweat droplets still drying on their forehead from their time in the May 9 action. “It gives me goosebumps every time because it’s just – it’s unparalleled.”
In the ensuing human-obstacle-ridden race to break out of the pack and score points, knees meet crotches. Thighs hit the floor with a smack. The fans at the Thunderdome, a DIY mini arena sandwiched between a gas station and a low-slung church in a stretch of Buda warehouses, can hardly take their eyes off the track. If it isn’t a nail-biting chase around the angled oval, it’s a gasp-inducing chest-to-back smash, or, in the almost-quiet moment before a jam begins, it’s playful flirtation between jammers as they go from off-track friends to on-track rivals.
Roller Derby’s charisma is practically instinctual to any subculture fan, even if the rules take a second to compute. It’s speed plus aggression to the snarky, empowered tune of do-it-yourself transgression. Especially in Austin, where the latest Roller Derby renaissance began in 2001.
For 25 years, Texas Roller Derby has been at the forefront of the offbeat sport’s national imagination. Captured in 2006 reality television series Rollergirls, 2007 documentary Hell on Wheels, and fictionalized in Drew Barrymore’s 2009 directorial debut Whip It, the early Aughts rise of sport-on-skates in Central Texas was well-remarked upon and triggered a national phenomenon, with clubs popping up from California to New York. Even as their flat-track friends have sprouted more robust interstate competition on a level surface, these slope-defying adrenaline junkies have helped bring the game’s origin into the modern moment, with a signature flair for showmanship.
“To me, it’s like, you can be somebody bigger than you could ever be on your own,” says founding Putas del Fuego captain La Muerta. “You can be a star if you want to. You could be a quieter one if you want to and be real sneaky and mean. Everybody gets their little thing that they get to be – and they get to be appreciated and loved.” Though an early injury meant she would never actually skate in an official game, the dedicated organizer remained a part of the league and its business for many years, immortalized in the invention of the penalty wheel, a one-of-a-kind Texas special she thought up to keep the game interactive when early players’ feet were moving slower than their dreams. For minor penalties, like blocking with your forearm or hitting a skater above the collarbone, an offender spins the wheel and initiates a mini game of sorts. Tug-of-war, pillow fights, arm wrestling, and more play on the raucous schoolyard mentality of the interactive sport.
Spank Alley, an intermission between the third and fourth quarters wherein audience members line up for bottom smacks from skaters in celebration of a birthdays, graduations, breakups, or, say, being a reporter at the derby bout certainly is in line with this spirit too.
“Banked-track TXRD is really special in that it’s more entertainment-focused than I think a lot of flat-track leagues are,” says 2024 initiate Low Blow. “What I really like about TXRD is the theatricality of it all: the fun bout makeup and the boutfits and the shenanigans and the gags that we pull for the audience.”
TXRD’s aesthetics uphold an emphatically punk-influenced, feminist take on oft-sexualized tropes. Joan Jett and Bikini Kill feature heavily in the bout soundtrack, with energy-forward hip-hop mixed in. A sport that always rewarded toughness and encouraged players to craft their own identities, derby’s misfit ethic has grown more inclusive in a time when other athletics have become embroiled in meaningless arguments over binary gender and perceived biology. The players, having embraced their clever names so thoroughly they often forget each other’s street names, become larger-than-life personas. The game has all the costumed combativeness of a WWE wrestling match, the athletic grace of speed skating, and the good-natured performance of drag.
“I don’t think that I have been able to find a sport that fulfills me as much as banked-track does,” says Stevie Kicks. Her moniker was drawn from a shared height with the Fleetwood Mac singer and a life spent on the soccer pitch.
“I love soccer. I have always loved it. I played it for decades, but this was just that extra little oomph,” she shrugs. “I have the same community, the same amount of people that are in my corner, but this is that little bit more razzle-dazzle.”
That razzle-dazzle is no flashy facade. It’s the cherry on top of years of hard work, for each individual player and for this scrappy sport as a whole. Bruised knees, twisted ankles, tireless dedication, and tough time management skills have formed the gameplay seen today, and the vibrant personalities that make it worth watching.
Born out of marathon dancing and bicycling competitions in the Great Depression, escapist performance has always been at the center of Roller Derby. According to legend, inventor Leo Seltzer drew up the initial idea for a banked-track endurance skating event on a restaurant tablecloth in Chicago in 1935. On the sloped ovular circuit, angling for accelerated speeds, the co-ed skaters clumped together, jostling each other for the lead. Seltzer and sportswriter Damon Runyon picked up on the audience’s enthusiasm for the occasional shoves and crashes that inevitably emerged. Within two years of taking the show on the road, they’d developed a full-contact, team-based game in which jammers earn points for passing members of the opposing team.
Wars and recessions waged, casting Roller Derby in and out of the spotlight as resources and public interest waxed and waned. Televised stints from the Fifties through the Seventies kept the rough-and-tumble theatrics in the cultural zeitgeist, but the sport fell steeply by the wayside in the Eighties. At the turn of the decade, a brief Nineties revival was captured in the single-season reality show Roller Games.
The founders of TXRD (then the Lonestar Rollergirls) knew practically none of this when they crowded into Casino El Camino in January 2001 at the invitation of Daniel “Devil Dan” Policarpo. Policarpo wasn’t long for the roller community, or Austin for that matter – which some suggest was for the best – but he ignited a spark in a group of the city’s bartenders and young professionals, wives and loners that they’ve kept burning in the quarter century since.
Before she’d donned a derby name, April “La Muerta” Ritzenthaler (then Hermann) was turning 30 and feeling like she needed to do something with her life. A self-employed massage therapist, she had grown up roller skating in Southern California and had been practicing martial art Muay Thai in Austin for a couple of years when Policarpo approached her about the meet-up he was arranging to start a Roller Derby league.
“I figured nobody – maybe 10 women – would be there,” the curly-haired business owner says. “There were 50 women.”
That fateful night, the 50-odd women clumped together according to where they drank and who they knew. Policarpo pitched his vision for the revitalized derby, a circus-inspired extravaganza spiked with violence that skewed more performance art than sport. The crowded tables became teams, informal glances elected captains, and the four original contingents of TXRD were formed.
Mio Alvarado, “an old L.A. Chicano rock and roller,” as his friend Ritzenthaler describes him, was bartending that night, and christened La Muerta’s team Putas del Fuego. After some stop-and-start motion and fundraising disputes with Policarpo, the Hellcats were helmed by Nancy “Iron Maiden” Haggerty, the Holy Rollers by Heather “Sugar” – or “Miss Information” – Burdick, and the Rhinestone Cowgirls, since shortened to Rhinestones, by Anya “Hot Lips Dolly” Jack.
The fledgling league had teams, but no real grasp on its identity or the norms of the game. La Muerta remembers sitting around saying to each other: “We know we want it to be sporty, but we also know that it needs to have entertainment in it. And we’re not very good skaters.”
Lessons from a Waco speed skater and local figure skater helped advance their footwork. Practice was already underway when Rachelle “Sparkle Plenty” Moore found a book in the University of Texas library that laid out the ground rules. Later, a VHS from the Sixties gave the girls their first visual of how gameplay should look.
Creating a sports organization from scratch is no simple task. The time commitment on and off the track intimidated over 100 women in those early years, La Muerta estimates. She herself took a nearly yearlong break from the league starting in 2002. At that time, tensions were mounting between the founding captains and fellow establishing members without titles of power. The disputes led to a split in leadership, spawning the flat-track Texas Rollergirls, and a good bit of animosity between the two, in 2003.
After the split, TXRD went banked, purchasing a Seventies-era track from the San Francisco Thunderbirds and accumulating additional injuries as they attempted to master sloped skating. Shortly afterward, they added a fifth team: the Cherry Bombs. Along with the new challenge and new team came a renewed determination to establish an organizational structure that honored the anti-patriarchal, communal effort that grounded the group. La Muerta, having rejoined at this point, helped the teams enact a similar membership system to the one they have to this day.
“While you’re working, as long as you’re putting effort into the business, then you are considered a member of the business,” La Muerta explains. Membership is no mere title. Once a player is voted into the organization, they become an official business partner and sign up for a league job. Athletes work volunteer hours in various roles to support the organization, putting in more hours on the computer some weeks than at practice. In Hell on Wheels, directed by local Bob Ray, we watch early captains struggle to build guidelines for governance and who should take on what role, bickering over time spent contributing to the institution’s start. Shortly after filming on that documentary wrapped, with informed rules freshly inked, cameras arrived for Rollergirls.
“We started filming that reality TV show in ’05,” remembers Cherry Bombs founding member Honey Homicide. “Overnight, we became this national sensation, and we had more press and more fans than we could possibly handle,” she recalls. “While I’m glad that it took derby to a whole new level on the world stage, it was really, really stressful for us as an organization.”
The emerging structure was put through trial by fire again as players raced to formalize an intentional rulebook with all eyes on them. The tumultuous beginning stage was well documented in the early media attention TXRD caught, but the expansion that’s happened in the decades since has been largely offscreen.
“Anything that has existed for 25 years becomes institutionalized,” says Hellcats founding member Witch Baby. After skating for four years, she left, returning a decade later to a league with scheduled skill workshops and an initiative training program – and a more inclusive roster of players.
“The first time around, a lot of us had not been athletes,” she smiles. “We joined Roller Derby instead of joining a band.” When Witch Baby joined the first time she immediately became a Hellcats member. Later, she learned being drafted without some training or tryout wasn’t the norm even then, but the players that recruited her sensed that if they didn’t put her on a team, she wouldn’t stick around. “They probably were right,” she admits. “Then I learned – destroyed my knees, destroyed my ankles, learning how to stay upright.”
Skating on a banked track is hard. Mitigating injuries while gliding strategically through a vocabulary of stops and starts, blocks and positions, is even harder. These facts haven’t changed. Even with today’s scaffolding of educational offerings, new skaters are still drawn to the sport at all levels of experience. Most have a lot of learning to do.
“I had never quad skated in my life, but I bought skates to do Roller Derby because I wanted to be in the community, and I thought the sport was so fucking cool,” the Rhinestones’ Jose Queervo remembers. Having seen TXRD play once in Arizona, they moved to Austin to join the banked-track crew. They bought “the shittiest low-end roller skates,” probably not too dissimilar from the Britney Spears line on sale at Dillard’s that La Muerta remembers everyone having in 2002. “I didn’t make it in my first round. I made it in my second round. I’ve been in the league since 2018.”
Stevie Kicks, who frequently shines as an enduring blocker or an unofficial team-leading pivot, broke her leg in the rookie program. She was back on skates, angling to complete the curriculum and get drafted, as soon as she could. “It’s fine, it still works,” she says, gesturing to the leg.
“I could barely finish the tryout,” says recent Holy Roller addition Low Blow. She’d picked up roller skating in the pandemic and, while buying fresh wheels from Hellcats alum Glitterotica at Medusa Skates, was invited to the upcoming trials. She’d missed the preceding workshops but showed up anyway. “Jose Queervo had to help me. They literally had to hold my hands as I walked up and down the track.”
Low Blow started at the derby academy taught by Holy Rollers retiree Lacey Bones, then advanced through the three-month Roller Rookies program. “I didn’t actually know the rules of Roller Derby until month three,” they laugh, a move unintentionally mirroring the Aughts founders’ own incongruous journey to the sport. A dialect of skate moves, play strategy, and derby lingo under their belt, Low Blow was then voted into the league and became a Hired Gun for six months, skating on different teams and sussing out which one might be a good fit before being drafted to the Holy Rollers.
“The last part of your final evaluation at the end of [Roller Rookies] is a bout between the rookies [and] the vets,” the skater explains, an experience that felt terrifying on the rookie side, but rewarding returning now as an official team member. “I was in their shoes a year ago. Literally, this time last year. And it was really fun to see how much you can grow as a skater in that time.”
“I didn’t make it in that first draft, but that’s okay, because I needed more time to incubate,” recalls Stevie Kicks, who now not only plays with Putas del Fuego, but on TXRD’s traveling team with Jose Queervo. A second round of playing as a Hired Gun prepared her not just to skate more confidently, but to take on leadership roles within both teams. “It was amazing and super tiring, but super worth it to be able to go and just really get my skills where they needed to be.”
“It changes the way you feel about your body. It changes the way you feel about what is possible,” Witch Baby agrees. Persistence and commitment are the chief values rewarded by this rugged game, and the rewards are consequential.
“There is no community like the Roller Derby community,” says Jose Queervo. “It’s not perfect. That’s for sure. But I have found, generally speaking, that people are willing to put in the work in these spaces in ways that they are willing or not able to do outside of here.”
That community, historically, has stretched to expand those who want to be a part of it, even if that envelopment takes time. Initially coed teams were frequently divided into gendered teams. Women’s-only groups have led the revival movement, and occasional TERF wars have broken out over who is welcome in those spaces. Nationally, however, many groups have now dropped the “girl” in rollergirls (or the Cowgirl in Rhinestone Cowgirls, in this case) and opened their doors to gender-nonconforming players.
“Our idea of what was normal and what was feminist and what was transgressive was really different [when we started] than it was in the late 2010s,” Witch Baby says. “For me, when I went back, that was actually a really cool thing. I got to skate with trans skaters. I got to learn a lot more about queer culture than I ever would have, maybe, as a cis-het white girl with privilege, and that was great for me.”
As gender diversity expands, other minority skaters have also found their way to the track. Though Roller Derby was one of the first sports to become racially integrated in the late Fifties, it has remained majority-white demographically, even in diverse cities.
“TXRD has come a really long way,” says Low Blow, one of the organization’s few Black skaters. “But I am very excited to continue pushing that boundary forward and really pushing visibility for BIPOC skaters. It really meant a lot to me to see other Black skaters in the league before I joined, and I really hope that my presence does the same for any prospective skaters.”
For those that stick with the physically demanding sport, the strength found in their bodies, their work ethics, their identities, and their communities makes it a life-changing decision. Fury isn’t for the faint of heart – for those willing to embrace it, there are layers of empowerment to be found on four wheels.
“Roller Derby changed my life both times,” says Witch Baby. “The first time around, it was exactly the outlet that I needed, but also I was fucking mess. Derby gave me structure.” A decade of navigating business co-ownership and two pregnancies later, she returned to the banked track with new priorities. “I had two young children, and I needed to put myself first for a little while. I needed to remember that part of me that wasn’t a mom.”
The community-minded muscles worked in this player-driven organization, and the courage it takes to step back on the track again and again, don’t just stay in the arena.
“I found I got to hone leadership skills. I was on our board of directors for three years, I held multiple managerial positions, and that really propelled me in the business world [and] made me more assertive,” says Honey Homicide. On personal terms, it also helped her uncover and embrace elements of her identity. “I was able to find my brand of femininity, because traditional femininity had never appealed to me, ever.”
“There’s a lot from Derby that I’m really grateful for,” Low Blow says. “The confidence of knowing that I can see a challenge through, but also having my team and my community and a big group of people who all have a vision of something beyond ourselves, because the league is a really impressive feat on its own. It’s really cool to be a part of keeping that legacy alive.”
TXRD’s Hellcats face off against the Holy Rollers on Saturday, May 23, at the Thunderdome in Buda.
This article appears in May 22 • 2026.
