Sisterhood of the traveling packs

L.I.'s only female roller derby league kicks off fifth season

Posted

She’s only five feet two and weighs about 100 pounds, but Krissy Carambia can knock the wind out of you without so much as a bruise.

Carambia, better known by her derby alias Etta Jams, is a coach for the Long Island Roller Rebels, the Island’s only all-female flat-track roller derby league. She and fellow members of the league’s All-Star team (who play in what is called a “pack”) kicked off their season last week, facing off against the Suburbia Roller Girls in Yonkers. They’ll play their first home bout on March 12 at Skate Safe in Old Bethpage against the Connecticut Roller Girls.

“It’s a constant challenge for your mind and your body,” the 40-year-old Carambia said of the sport. This is her third year with the Roller Rebels and it has changed her life.

“You become a part of this family of women who support each other … strong, independent women who do their own thing,” Carambia said. “Roller derby has been a life-altering experience for me. It has changed me mentally, physically and spiritually in ways that are immeasurable. It has helped me overcome so many obstacles both on the track and off.”

For the Malverne resident, the sport is about camaraderie, about finding oneself. (It’s also how she found her fiancé, John, who is a skate instructor at one of the skating rinks at which the league practices.)

“This is an outlet: someone who didn’t fit in before now has a place where they’re accepted,” Carambia said. “It’s so many great things for so many people.”

And there are many types of people who participate in the sport. The Roller Rebels league has about 40 members who range in age from 21 to 50something. They come from Nassau, Suffolk, Brooklyn, Queens and elsewhere. They are students, lawyers, stay-at-home moms and everything in between.

Roller derby “brings all types of people together,” Carambia said. “It’s a great way to form a bond, it’s great exercise, it’s a great way to spend a Saturday.”

But just as important, the sport is empowering for many women, Carambia included. It’s therapy, she said, because being out there in the rink is being away from the stresses and routines of everyday life. It’s being part of a sisterhood of women who “have your back,” Carambia added.

And it’s nothing like the media has portrayed it: a violent activity where aggressive women know no rules and have no limits to their brutality. Carambia, who by day works at the Milk & Honey boutique in Rockville Centre, admits that she herself had at some point thought roller derby “was just big girls hitting each other.”

When it was first born in the 1920s and ‘30s, roller derby was about aggression and there weren’t any rules, but it has since transformed into a real sport, with standards, regulations and strategies. The Women’s Flat Track Derby Association, a nonprofit organization that began as that United Leagues Coalition in 2004, helped make the sport official, according to Carambia.

Like many contemporary roller derby leagues, the Roller Rebels is a grassroots league — all-female and self-organized. It began in 2005 as a group of eight and is now an official league with close to 50 members. And it keeps growing. Carambia credits that, in part, to increased media attention. New York City’s roller derby league, the Gotham Girls, has been active in gaining such attention, and recently appeared in a television commercial for Cheerios. Nike recently released a “Nike Throwdown” television commercial that featured roller derby. The movie “Whip It” — about a young girl whose life changes after she joins a roller derby league — was released in October 2009, generating major buzz about the sport. It starred A-list celebrities, including Ellen Page, Drew Barrymore, Marcia Gay Harden and Juliette Lewis.

According to Carambia, the Roller Rebels has generated its own publicity through fundraisers and its blog, The Rebel Yell, which Carambia started to help promote the league. The blog has served its purpose, expanding the league’s fan base and attracting potential members. But, according to its founder, it has also helped league members learn more about each other and keeps them all on the same page.

“[The] blog will serve as your personal portal into the world of the Long Island Roller Rebels,” Carambia wrote in a blog post. “We promise to not only inform you, but entertain you as well. So be prepared for bad puns, good fun and full (cyber) derby interaction.”

The Roller Rebels members meet three nights a week at United Skates of America in Seaford or Skate Safe in Old Bethpage. They don helmets, knee and elbow pads, wrist guards and mouth guards. “Skates are laced and they’re ready to, um, well, roll,” Carambia wrote in a Rebel Yell post. “High endurance skating drills, strength training, falling and hitting each other are just the beginning of what takes place, all for the thrill of competition and the love of the sport.”

Carambia gets personal in the blog, writing about her own love of the sport and of her teammates. “Roller derby from the very start has been a thrill ride for me, one I don’t ever want to get off of,” she wrote. “Sometimes when I stop to think about and attempt to explain my whole experience, there are just so many memories, emotions and feelings that run around in my head and really, I don’t know where or how to begin.”

She went on to call her teammates “sisters” with who she would trust secrets and to who she looks with respect and admiration.

“This is not the family I was born into,” Carambia wrote, “this is the family that I have chosen to be a part of.”

Visit the Roller Rebels’ website, longislandrollerrebels.com, and Carambia’s blog, longislandrollerrebels.blogspot.com, for more information.