Walk into an ordinary exhibition hall at the convention center.  Arched rows of folding chairs are set up on the plain, flat concrete floor.  Bright pink tape outlines an oval on the floor.  A second, larger caution-yellow tape oval encircles the pink.  Skaters wearing an eclectic mix of shorts, leggings, fishnet stockings, tights, bright knee socks, and all variety of helmets are circling the oval.  They all wear pads and their jerseys mostly match.  A handful of zebra black and white shirts are also in the mix.  This is the setting for Flat Track Roller Derby in Chattanooga.

A bit of preamble with safety equipment check, a rules review, demo for the new fans, and the National Anthem.  Now the bout; two 30 minutes periods broken into jams that last as much as 2 minutes.

Music is playing loudly.  An announcer named Rabbit gives the go ahead.  Fans stand, sit in the arches of chairs, and sit on the floor along the yellow oval in the suicide seats.  A cluster of skaters collects on the pink oval.  Ten in all, five green jerseys and five blue.  Jammers wear a star on their helmets and are in the back of the pack and blockers a solid colored bar on their helmet.  A whistle sounds and the skating/pushing/pulling begins.  The noise of music, skate wheels on concrete, bodies thumping together and to the floor is punctuated with lots of quick whistle bursts that track scoring and rule infractions.  The pace isn’t super fast but the action between players is so chaotic and the manual sort of scoring by refs and non-skating officials so entangled that I never really got so that I could follow everything.

The result 128 Chattanooga vs. 107 Classic City (AthensGA) and a fun new experience of us.