Name: Inga Knee’her
Number: 235
Travel Teams: Brawlstars and Marble City Mayhem
Home Team: Bombshell Bettys
Years skating: 12
You are new to HKRD, but you are definitely not new to derby! Where all have you skated?
I started my derby career at Steel City in Pittsburgh in 2010. I skated with them for seven seasons, I guess. I “retired” from Steel City in 2016 because I was taking an assignment in Japan; I skated with the Tokyo Roller Girls (2016-2017). I was only there for six months, but it was a wonderful experience. Came back to the US for a short period of time, but I didn’t really get back to derby until I moved overseas again with United Arab Emirates, and I helped form the national team there. Then this past spring I moved back to the US, to Knoxville, and now I’m with Hard Knox!
What brought you to Knoxville? This seems like a very small place compared to all of the others that you’ve been—I mean, we’re glad you’re here, but wow!
Here for work: I decided to leave the company that I had been with for all those really wonderful opportunities for about fourteen years, and I decided to come work at Oak Ridge, at the National Lab.
Have you always been interested in sports?
Oh no, not at all! That’s a great question. I was terrible at sports growing up, but I did grow up roller skating. That was kind of the thing that I did with mom and my sister, we did figure roller skating. It does exist, it’s a real thing! The little circles on the wooden roller rink, I would do those little circles. I would do dances like waltzes and tangos and I did some of the types of figure skating that you see in the Olympics as well, though I was not that good.
I imagine some of that translates to your derby style nowadays—do you find that it does?
It definitely does. I get a lot of comments from people that I look so graceful doing this or that or the other thing, and it’s just years and years and years of that type of figure skating. Not necessarily confidence, but just the comfort level with your body on skates.
What have been some of your favorite positions to play in roller derby?
I don’t have a good answer to that. They all have their benefits. I do like jamming because it’s a very tough challenge, not just physically but mentally and emotionally as well. Anybody that’s ever had a bad jam knows what I’m talking about! I like pivoting because it kind of lets you do both: it lets you be there for the jammer but not necessarily jamming, and also do all the blocking things. It just takes a level of awareness that’s a little bit more than being a traditional blocker, so those are probably my favorite things.
So tell me a little bit about your skater name. Is there a story behind it?
Yeah, so I never had a nickname growing up. My mom, her name is Patricia, and people would always call her “Patty” or “Pat” and she hated it, so she named both of her daughters names that could not be shortened. I never ever had a nickname, so I wanted to choose a roller derby name where it would be obvious what I would be called. You know, some names it’s hard, you initialize it, you know, how do you shorten it? But I wanted mine to be obvious how it would be shortened, I wanted it to be a nickname that I really liked, and I wanted it to be something that was meaningful to me. So mine’s a little bit multi-faceted. It’s a mispronunciation of my occupation, which is “engineer.” And the name “Inga” is also taken from my late grandmother’s middle name which is “Inger,” which is a very traditional Swedish name, and “Inga” is kind of the root name.
A funny story about that: I have played derby in Sweden, and I actually was the WFTDA mentor for Stockholm Roller Derby to go through the apprentice program and become a full member league years ago, and whenever I would go to Sweden and skate with them, they would speak Swedish to me because I look Swedish and I had a Swedish name, and they were like, “Why do you have like a grandma’s name?” Because it’s like an old lady name, Inga is like a Rose or an Ethel or that kind of name that we would consider “an old lady name,” which I feel like works well for me.
Do you feel like you have “old lady energy” maybe?
Yeah, I definitely got some “old lady energy.”
Well that’s a great moment! Do you have any other derby moments that you want to share? Any favorites?
Yeah, I was thinking about that before this interview, and my all-time favorite derby moment was when I was skating with Tokyo Roller Girls in Tokyo as a WFTDA team there. It’s—as you can imagine, even before the pandemic—it’s quite difficult to get sanctioned games, and we had a tournament at the end of my time there in Okinawa, and it was the end of I think our first sanctioned game that we were playing there. It was against the Okinawa team and it was like 30 seconds left on the game clock, and somebody had called an official review. I don’t remember if it was us or Okinawa, and we’re talking to the refs, and then the refs go off and are having their discussion about the official review. And I was the assistant captain, and I turned to the captain, and I said, “Do you want to do something different for this jam?” And she’s like, “I wasn’t really planning on it, what did you have in mind?” And I look at the score, we’re down by like 16 points, which is, a lot, but not, you know, impossible? For one jam left in the game? And I was like, “I really think we can win this. I think we can win it.” And she’s like, “Do whatever you think is best.”
Photo credit: Roadie Photography
So I went to the person that was supposed to be jamming next, and was Iike, “Do you mind if I jam?” She’s like, “No, I’m good, you can jam the next one.” And I look at the clock and I was like, “There isn’t going to be a next one.” And she looks at it, and she looks back at me, and she hands me the star. And she’s like, “I’m gonna block for you!” And I was like, “Okay!” And I pulled some of the strongest blockers, there were a couple who were like, “I’m gonna block for you! I’m gonna do this!” And I was like, “Alright, great! If you feel real confident that you can do this, come on in, let’s do it.” And I was like, “Alright, I need you guys just defense. If that jammer gets out (this was back when you still had jammer points, the fifth point) I was like, you need to keep the jammer. I don’t need any offense. If she gets out, it’s over, right? There’s no way we can win if their jammer gets out. So just like, you have to have to keep her.”
And we did, they kept her! They put in this massive scary jammer, her name was Sprocket, I’m friends with her, she’s amazing. They kept her, and I just kept skating, and I kept pushing, and I kept skating, and I was counting the points in my head, and the whistle blew and I was like coming up on the pack, and I was like, “Ugh, I didn’t make it, I didn’t do it, so close!” But then I look over at the scoreboard, and it ticks up, and we won by two points, and I was just so overcome, just telling this story again I’m just so overcome by emotion and just shock and relief, and some of the women on my team had never won a game before, like this was a huge moment for them to win their very first game, and I just sank to my knees on the track, and they all jumped on me and hugged me and were screaming, and it was just the most magical, and I was just really glad to be a part of that, and that it worked out. It was really amazing.
Photo Credit: Roadie Photography
That kind of goes into the next realm that I wanted to ask you about, because that’s you stepping up as a leader, and you’ve stepped up as a coach for our league. How has that been for you, coaching with us, or maybe how long have you been a coach with other leagues?
Oh, a long time I guess! I think I knew right away when I started skating and playing derby that I wanted to be a trainer, that I wanted to coach skaters and mentor skaters, and with Steel City, I think you had to have been skating for at least a year before you were allowed to join the training committee. I did that basically as soon as I was eligible in 2011, so I’ve been doing it for over ten years now. But I do just love the atmosphere of learning and cooperation and collaboration with Hard Knox. Everybody is like little sponges, soaking up all the information. There’s never complaints about drills or, “This was confusing, why are we doing this?” Everybody’s like, “This was confusing, I loved it!”
I’m just really enjoying being able to give back. At this point in my derby career I’m not interested in, you know, playing for a Top 10 team or, you know, even a Top 50 team at this point. But I just love being able to share what I’ve learned over the years with people that are excited about playing roller derby.
I feel like you’re reading my mind right now, because literally my next question was going to be what are some of your goals for this season, either as a skater or a coach? So is there any other goal that you have?
Just having fun, I think. I’d like to start in at least a couple games, is kind of my personal goal, just to be a starting skater for us. Score some points, block some jammers, take some star passes, and just help people be their best selves.
Photo Credit: @Stevendaltonphotography
How do you spend your time outside of derby?
[laughs] Other than work? I do lots of things. I work at the lab, obviously, which can be very consuming. I work on advanced reactors. My official job title is Senior R&D Staff for Innovative Nuclear Reactors, and I’m very interested in helping address climate change through advanced reactor technology deployment, so that’s kind of my work/work life goals. I am also an adjunct professor at Penn State. I help teach a course on team performance, which comes in very handy for roller derby.
I’m currently on the ballot to join the board of directors for a local girl scout organization that needed some help (I was a girl scout growing up). A lot of the councils are really just struggling now, so I’m trying to help out with that.
I’m learning to play guitar. I love to travel when I can. I sew, I cook, I kill plants, despite my best efforts.
I’m now imagining a…something between girl scouts and roller derby, that feels like a natural partnership.
For sure! Yeah, there’s so many parallels, and actually my interviews for the board position, you know I always put roller derby on my resume because people will either see it and be like, “Well that’s interesting,” or they’ll be like “That’s interesting!” and they’ll ask me about it, and then I get to talk about roller derby. But I do talk about that, where a lot of women come to roller derby later in life, having never had that sort of growth in leadership personal development opportunity that roller derby provides, and I see that girl scouts is really kind of a similar thing where you learn that you can do more than you think you can, and you are stronger than you think you are.
A lot of leagues right now are trying to find their way back to skating after we all had to pause our seasons in 2020. What advice would you give to returning skaters?
That’s a good question. It’s a little bit tough for me because I never really stopped, we were still skating when I was overseas. I guess I stopped for a little bit, I was in apartment quarantine for 94 days. I may have skated inside my apartment a little bit.
I think the advice that I would give is that you don’t have to come back if your heart isn’t in it, if you haven’t missed it. It’s okay, you know, to move on with your life. It will still be here again, you know, if you do decide, if you change your mind later and want to come back. Derby will persist, it will be here, it will be around. I don’t think that it’s going anywhere. To me, with derby, the mental aspect has always been the most important part. Yes it’s physically demanding, but it’s time-consuming and you have to arrange your life to make it a priority in order to make it work, and if that’s not something that you can do right now, that’s okay, you know. Let those that are ready and are willing to arrange their lives to come and make it happen, you know, let them take it on, let them make it grow. You’d be surprised what will happen.
I’m hearing you say, “Have grace with however your life has changed in the last couple years.”
Definitely. I think that’s something that we’ve all taken away from the pandemic (or at least I hope most other people have taken away) is just give yourself some grace, you have to to get through and go to the next thing.
Who would you like to nominate for next month, and what do you want to ask them?
I’d like to choose Bear (Roller Bear), and I would ask how she is always so able to keep her positive attitude at practice.