Fight Club

Slice says she chose her skaters for their ability to play more than one position, "to give a hit and take a hit." The team also ended up with many of the biggest women in the league, and it soon had a reputation for a bruising level of play. Slice says that when she notified two of her picks, the women expressed relief: Everyone they were scared of in the league was on Scare Force One.

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NEAR THE END OF WINTER, THE WEATHER HAS FINALLY DRIVEN THE TEAM INDOORS from the parking garage. The first bout is a few weeks away, but persistent colds have plagued the team, whose work-hard, play-hard ethic tends to leave everyone chronically short on sleep. Energy is at an ebb. It is difficult to generate the hard-earned bonhomie of a good practice in a public skating rink, the cheapest option in inclement weather, but where the team is not allowed to scrimmage or run drills. Tonight, the skaters have joined open skate at D'Light Skate N Palace, a cavernous relic from skating's glory days in Temple Hills. For strength training, they do laps in a crouch around the broad wood-plank floor to thunderous R&B, dodging small children and couples with their hands in each others' back pockets.

Halfway through the evening, the skaters retire to the rink's party room, an unheated and dimly lit space with a couple of old Happy Birthday banners strung along one wall, where Slice convenes a meeting around a long table. Although the skaters contribute regularly to their online discussion group, there are always issues for a captain to discuss with her team in person. Tonight, there is the question of a mascot ("Does anyone have any preference about a mascot for our team? Because personally I couldn't give a [expletive] about a mascot"), what the team needs to focus on in practice ("endurance and strategy"), and attendance, a topic on which Slice is particularly inflexible. "We sucked in January," she says, "and we're not starting this month off any better."

Slice narrows her eyes and stares at her team. "Does anyone know how many weeks we have before our bout?" she asks. "Because this is crunch time, and it doesn't feel like crunch time. It feels like a slump." The team sits in silence for a moment, and then the discussion turns to the planning of an overnight party, a team bonding event. When the meeting draws to a close, Helena Handbag and Dame Nation pack up their gear and walk out to the nearly empty parking lot, which has begun to whiten under a light snow.

Nation, 22, has a black bob, an understated but precise manner and several piercings on her face. She is co-captain as well as the team's tactician, with a knack for information-gathering and for teaching new strategies and techniques. Nation spends a lot of time on Internet chat groups of derby coaches, referees and statisticians, tracking and contributing to the evolution of the game. When she travels for work -- she's a research fellow in cognitive neuroscience at the National Institutes of Health -- she often stops by the local league, questions in hand.

Nation grew up playing sports but found that her options after she left college were unsatisfying. She says that the guys on her coed work softball team "would literally run into my zone and take a catch I'd called -- and they didn't seem to think there was anything wrong with this behavior." Her parents, who are art historians, once did what they could to discourage their daughter's athleticism, enforcing a "one sport at a time" rule. This did not dissuade Nation from playing basketball and softball, learning tae kwon do and small-boat sailing and "imitating the American Gladiators," the short-lived precursor to today's reality survival shows, in which regular people battled spandexed bodybuilders. Her parents have, however, been supportive about derby. "When I told them I joined up, they told me about my maiden aunts who watched banked track every Sunday night in the '70s," and whose interest in derby, she says, "was pretty alarming family gossip at the time."

Nation's first name is Rebecca, but she asked that her full name be withheld from this article. "I'm trying to ensure that anyone Googling my real name only turns up professional stuff," she says. She hasn't told anyone in her office she skates derby, and when she skated into a wall and her face swelled up, she told her co-workers that she had been in a car accident. Plus, her boss, she says, "makes me take out my piercings when I come in, so I don't think she'd be really excited about derby." This fall, Nation has begun a doctorate in cognitive neuroscience at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and is transferring to the local league, the Carolina Rollergirls. "When I win the Nobel Prize," she says, "or get a teaching job with tenure, I'll come out of the derby closet."

IN THE MONTH BEFORE THE FIRST BOUT, Scare Force One is practicing four or five times a week, for two or three hours at a stretch. They work on their endurance and form, and they put together a blocking move, which they dub, with their typical bawdy humor, the Great Wall of 'Gina. They scrimmage hard against each other and beat the league's other teams in practices. And then they go to the East Coast Derby Extravaganza.

The ECDE, hosted by the Philadelphia Rollergirls, is a two-day, three-rink festival of roller derby, in which leagues from up and down the East Coast skate against each other as well as in mixed-league scrimmages with themes: brunettes versus blondes, tattoos versus no tattoos, tall versus short and "T versus A." The event falls on the weekend before the DC league's first public bout, which has deterred many of DC's skaters from attending, to avoid the risk of injury.

In typical DC league practices, skaters have tended to pull their punches, not wanting to hurt each other or themselves. Many of the skaters at the extravaganza are from older, more established leagues, and the seniority shows: Their packs are fast, and they hit hard. Scare Force One, with nearly half of the team in attendance, gets pounded. On Saturday night, Helena Handbag (or Hellie, as she is known in the league), gets hit in the face and spends some time propped against the side of the rink looking stunned, one hand trembling in the air.

For Hellie, who has no background in skating or athletics, derby was less a sport than a life that she fell into. The 37-year-old from Northwest Washington is outgoing and brightly sarcastic, with a pixyish grin. A freelance graphic designer, she has a degree in graphic design and photography from the Corcoran College of Art and Design. Before joining the league, she had taken a job as a bouncer at the 9:30 club, which she sees now as part of a search for a particularly aggressive kind of physical activity, a search that eventually led to derby.

Shortly after Hellie began skating derby, her marriage ended. While this was, to a certain extent, timing -- "Clearly, I needed to get a divorce anyway," she says -- she credits derby with providing her the impetus and the nerve. "Derby does so much for so many people in different ways. For me, it was ending this horrible, horrible marriage that I had been miserable in." She began dating Nation, whom she met in the league. "The joke is that I skated without a helmet and turned gay," she says, "and now I skate with a helmet because I don't want to get hit again and go back to being straight."