Jennifer Gilbert grew up here, but she’s the first to tell you Peoria is not her kind of town. Roller derby brought her back.
“I am so stoked!” Gilbert says, after conducting a two-hour workout with the Peoria Push Derby Dames.
Two months ago, the Dames did not exist and Gilbert was still living in St. Louis. Now, nearly three dozen women practice four nights a week at the Peoria Palace roller rink, just off Route 6 in Mossville. They skate, pack, fall, block, push and jam while preparing to unload the growing sport of women’s flat-track roller derby on central Illinois later this year.
They are teachers, health professionals, business managers, college students, wives and moms. Some wear more ink than a newspaper. Some appear to have retained the Easter Bunny as hair stylist. Others might have been pageant queens.
But they all fit the roller-derby profile.
“Strong women who want to preserve an identity for themselves, whether as a mother or a single career woman or whatever, and rope off an area just for them,” Jennifer Gilbert says.
Gilbert is a derby veteran whose derby name is “Pro.” She is the Push’s coach. More in a moment about how that came to pass, but first you should know how and why the Peoria team was born.
Last year, there was a movie titled “Whip It,” starring Ellen Page as a small-town Texas loner who discovers her inner strength with a roller-derby team from Austin. In Peoria, Becca Rees saw the film and decided, “This looks like way too much fun.” Her friend Jessica Nolan had the same reaction. “We were hooked,” Rees says.
The two women found out there was a league going in the Quad Cities, so they drove over to check it out. There, they were told another Peoria-area woman, Teresa Thompson of Hanna City, had been showing interest, too.
Thompson had discovered a Facebook page, “Peoria Needs A Roller Derby League,” started by an East Peoria woman named Sam Boehle. When Thompson contacted her last fall, Boehle had just delivered a baby and couldn’t skate. But she gave Thompson permission to take over the page — and by the way, Boehle had a high school friend named Jennifer Gilbert, who was big into flat-track roller derby. In fact, Gilbert was playing for a touring team out of St. Louis known as the Arch Rival Roller Girls.
Thompson contacted Gilbert, who drove to Peoria for an organizational meeting.
“After the meeting,” Thompson says, “Pro says, ‘I can be your coach.’ And we all said, ‘Hell, yes!’”
Gilbert, 29, is a freelance manuscript editor, with a flexible work schedule and freestyle life. A few years ago, she traveled alone to a friend’s wedding in Cleveland, where she met some derby girls.
“I ended up getting wasted with the Cleveland league,” she says. “I didn’t buy a drink all night. I stayed an extra week to go to their practices and then basically ran away with the circus.”
A former high school distance runner with a motor stuck in overdrive, Gilbert says her derby name is short for “pro-agonist” or “pro-agony.” Injuries have curtailed her competitive career, but she has helped start recreational leagues in St. Louis, and so she jumped at the opportunity to build the sport in her hometown.
Pro says she loves the derby, but the real draw is the empowerment felt by the women who play.
They come in all shapes, sizes and ability levels.
Thompson has worked as a welder, served in the Army Reserves, and she rides a Harley.
“Anything weird and awful is me,” she says. Until Push practices began in mid-February, Thompson says, she had been on roller skates only a couple of times in her whole life. “My husband says, ‘Does everything in your life have to be a challenge?’”
According to her smile, yes.
On the other end of the ability spectrum is Beth Anderson, event manager at the Peoria Civic Center. Anderson skates as if she was born with rollers on her feet and aspires to be a jammer, the derby position whose job it is to score points by lapping members of the rival team’s pack.
“This fit right in with my mid-life crisis,” Anderson says.
One appeal of the sport itself is the physicality. It’s legal to knock down opponents in the process of blocking them, as long as a player does so with shoulders, hips and buttocks and contact stays below the shoulders and above mid-thigh. Illegal contact, which includes elbows and head butts, is penalized.
Another appeal is to the players’ alter-egos. When they hit the track, they’re no longer “Mom” or “Sis” or the woman in the office down the hall or the girl next door. They’re “Pro” or “Crackerjack” or “Siouxsicide Bomb” or “Cougar Candy” — or whoever they want to be.
After passing a basic skills test, each player gets to pick a name. At that point, they’re also a step closer to being able to form teams and start competing under the rules of the sanctioning body, the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association.
The process is a grueling one. Coach Pro has a five-phase plan to get the Peoria women ready: basic skills, pack work, hitting, scrimmage drills and finally, “full-on game” — or “bout” as the contests are called.
Pro was teaching pack drills last week. She and the Push members hope they’ll be ready to compete by mid- to late-autumn.
Meanwhile, the women pay $50 a month in dues, which help pay for rink rental. They also invest anywhere from $175 to $350 apiece, and sometimes more, for equipment, which includes skates, pads and helmet. Finally, there’s the eight hours per week of workouts — all on top of their jobs and home lives.
But the payoff doesn’t come in dollars and cents.
“How often,” Rees says, “do you get to push the heck out of somebody for no other reason than to play a game?”
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