You may recall our post about Ginger Tonix from the Richter City Rollers. Well I finally got to see these roller derby girls in person at the Richter City Rollers grading day this week. These girls are awesome. With race names like Tuff Bikkies, Lux Vengence, Sneaky Darkie, Suffer Jet and so on. In fact, roller derby race names have to be registered, and here’s the database of registered names.

Uniforms are typically stripey socks, fishnets, frilly knickers and leopard skin. Plus ‘tude, lots of ‘tude. Most of the kiwi girls get their roller derby gear from sincityskates.com.

The grading seemed to go well – lots of enthusiastic ladies showing their super skate skills. While there was too many press-ups for my liking, the skating drills, falling drills, and blocking drills looked so much fun.

If you wanna join the Richter City Rollers in Welly team check them out here, else here’s some other links to NZ leagues:

Auckland – Pirate City Rollers www.piratecityrollers.com
Christchurch – Dead End Derby www.deadendderby.com
Taranaki – Taranaki Roller Corps www.myspace.com/newplymouthrollerderby
Northland – Northland Nightmares www.bebo.com/NorthlandN
Hamilton – HELLmilton Roller Derby http://www.myspace.com/hellmilton666

Or if you just wanna find out more about the sport check out Fieldtheory on publicaddress.net.

PS I thought of a roller derby name for myself – Sockin’ Awe. What’s yours?

photos copyright to Michael Roseingrave