A past coach of mine decided to speak up and break the silence surrounding peoples' relationship with Roller Derby, good and bad. I've been rolling comments around in my head the last couple days and I think I've come to a better understanding on why derby can be so wonderful but so hard.
People have passion.
People express passion for sports all the time both as fans and as players and that passion, when your team is winning a championship and that sense of loss, helplessness or a feeling of seeing insurmountable tasks pile up people feel really are two sides of the same coin. The highs are dizzying and wonderful, the lows are soul crushing and make you wonder why you bother. People want to love, people want to fall in love with what they do, with who they root for, with the people they do it with.
In this way, roller derby is no different than any other sport, except for that many of the people who play roller derby also run the league's day to day business; from accounting to marketing and sales to legal to management to human resources, slamming a small but motivated motley crew of players from nearly all ages, experience levels and areas of competence together and expecting to get a perfect result is not a recipe for perfection.
Roller derby isn't a business. We fall in love. We get hurt. We get angry. We express that anger. We get frustrated. We fall out of love. We set fire to the people and places that hurt us and vow to never let it happen again. We start new leagues, we taken on entirely too much responsibility. We burn out. We get bitter. We see motivated people as naive and useless. We lose the patience to build the team and the sport we love.
... because it's like a goddamn relationship, except your in a complex multipersonal relationship between people with varying levels of communication skills, trust levels and commitments. It's so easy to fall in love and pull all the wonderful relationship energy from everyone, and so easy to get hurt by just one thing, one miscommunication, one slight whether intentional or not.
Everyone can be well meaning and still fail. Everyone can want the same thing but still end up moving in terrible directions. Everyone can still love the team and love the sport but take action to destroy it all.
It's because we love what we do and we need to give it the space, the respect and I think most importantly... the understanding and the compassion to help everyone on the team succeed,
to push the team to succeed.
to push the sport to succeed.
to learn to love and maintain a long term healthy relationship with roller derby and to steward that love and spread it to other people.
Comments? Head over to Reddit and chime in.
