Name: Sin City Rebel
Number: 702
Travel Teams: All Stars & Marble City Mayhem
Home Team: Moonshine Moxies
Years skating: 8
She’s always a calming presence on the track—unless you’re her opponent, in which case, you’d better watch out for a hard hit outta nowhere! Get to know this seasoned blocker: May’s Featured Skater, Sin City Rebel.
You were nominated by Magically Malicious, who has a few questions for you. First, how excited are you this year as co-captain of the charter, because, in her words, you are rocking it and you are so awesome? (And I agree with her!)
I’m pretty excited. I really like to be involved in trying new things when it comes to the team and all of that kind of stuff, so I’m very excited. I don’t know if I’m rocking it since I’ve only done it for one game, so I don’t know if it’s really rocking it, or I was just kind of like, “I’m here!” But I’m pretty excited for that, especially with as many good people as we have and as many people that have been there a little longer than I have been there—it’s a big honor for me, that my own skaters and friends and people that I spend a lot of time with chose me. It’s great.
And second, how do you stay so calm on the track when it is hectic? Because you are calmness personified somehow for the entire game, no matter what.
I’ve really thought about this for awhile, because I’ve always felt that I am out of control, but I have had a lot of people say when things are getting really tough on the track and everything, you’re always the one that’s like, “It’s alright, let’s get together, calm down, small movements” (is what everybody likes to make fun of me about). But I think on the track because of the fact that, when you are on the track, you are a figure of your team. If you are running at the mouth, or if you’re yelling at referees and stuff like that, it doesn’t just look bad on you, it looks bad on the team. So one thing I do not want to do is make my team look bad for any reason whatsoever. So I stay as calm as I can in the situations on the track. I mean, of course I get a penalty and sometimes I look at the refs and put my hands up like, “Really?” But when I’m not on the track and I’m on the bench though, I do not feel like I’m very calm, because I’ll be the first one to say something about something. It’s nice to know that I do put off that I’m very calm and collected, even though in my brain I’m probably screaming inside, like “Oh my god!” It’s just something I think that I got from playing sports before that, you know, you are a reflection of your team, so if you are doing something that is not a good reflection of your team, then it doesn’t just look bad on you, it looks bad on everybody.
How long do you think it took you to develop that sort of mindset? Was it strictly a derby thing, or did it come from those other sports that you just mentioned?
I didn’t have to do it in my other sports because I had my parents to do it for me! They were the voices, and I was just the player, you know? But as I’ve—even when I was coaching a sport for my daughters, I was (between me and the other coach) I was the calm one. I was like, “Hey, you know, they’re little, we can’t be out here screaming and all of that kind of stuff.” But when it comes to derby, I think once I really got the whole gist of derby—which, I like to tell the new people, it takes years before you get everything, before you understand. And then sometimes even after as many years as I've been playing, I’m like, “Oh, I didn’t know that!” You really never feel like you know everything, but I have found that my team keeps me that way. When you have people on the track like Bush and Lyda, and they’re calm, even in the worst situations on the track, it rubs off on you, and you want to be, you’re like, “Okay, if they’re still calm, then I should still be calm.” So I think that’s where that comes from with this team.
How did you discover roller derby then?
This is a really hard one. So I had a friend up in North Dakota that—she had told us that she was playing roller derby, and she had invited me and my family to come watch her. So I went and watched, and of course I had no idea what was going on, but I thought it was really cool, and I thought all of these girls were really cool out here, and I loved the fact that everybody was different—different sizes and different race, different everything. And at the time, I didn’t really have anything that I was doing. I was telling my sister about roller derby, and we saw a sign for a game, and of course, the town that I was living in was like, five miles wide, so it wasn’t very big. So I said, “We should go watch. I think you would like it too.” She came with me, and at the end of the game, we’re talking and I think I had talked to a couple of skaters, and they were like, “Hey, we’ve got a bootcamp coming up really soon.” And I was like, “What is that, or fresh meat?” They were like, “If you want to join!” And I was like, “Well I don’t know how to play.” And they were like, “Oh no, we teach you everything!” And I was like, “Okay!” I looked at my sister and said, “What do you think? We should do this?” And she said, “Yeah, let’s go to the informational!” Because you go to the informational and you try on gear, you see if you can—if you’re a baby deer or not. So we go and by the end of the information, I am smitten. I am like, I’m doing this. I look at my sister and said, “We’re doing this!” And she was like, “Oh no, I never was going to do this. I just knew that you wouldn’t go unless I came with you.” So that’s how I ended up going to fresh meat because my sister, she literally duped me. I thought this was something me and her were going to do together, and she was like, “Oh no, I’m going to sit up here while you go get your butt creamed, and I’m going to be your biggest fan!” Which, of course, she is my biggest fan. So that’s how it happened.
So how long were you with that team?
I was with the Grand Forx Sugar Beaters. I joined them in 2015 and then in 2018 I stopped playing with them and then I, instead of playing with them, I was actually playing with teams around the area. I would go and foster for them and actually, I consider having three teams up there that I ended up falling in love with (a bunch of other teams, and being part of their team too) so I have tons of jerseys from other seasons and stuff. So got the Grand Forks Sugar Beaters, we’ve got the Kampeska Krushers, which are in Watertown, South Dakota, and then we’ve got A-Town [Roller], which is in Aberdeen, South Dakota. They are all my family. I actually have three derby wives up there, who will forever be my derby wives, and we all are family and all of that. So I played there until 2019 up there, and then I moved here to Tennessee.
When you were on each of those three different teams, did you find that you inhabited a similar role, as far as what position on the track, or how you interact with the other teammates, or was there a different vibe for each team?
Well the two teams in South Dakota, they played exactly like each other. They were all family too because the teams were very close, and we would, if Kampeska was coming to play us and they didn’t have enough people, you knew that A-Town was going to be there with them. So the derby community up there is very small because the towns are so small. I just remember the first time I played against Watertown. There was a girl on the team, her name is Juanna B. Out, is her derby name. And I remember, it was in my first year playing and I remember watching her, and I was like, “I want to be her, that’s who I want to be. I want to hit like her, I wanna have the confidence that she has, and all of that.” And me fostering for those teams, I got the skills that I have from watching them play, and them teaching me. I’d be like, “How did you do that?” And they’d be like, “Oh, it’s easy! Just do this, this, and this.” And it was like, “Well it sounds easy, you make it look easy, but I don’t think I’m able to do that!”
So I just tried to—I was a sponge, and I tried to sponge off of all of them, and learn from them, which eventually I did become the captain of the Forx Sugar Beaters, and I was part of their training. In my last year there I did training and captain. I’ve been treasurer on the team too, so I’ve been in some roles before, but there was a lot of stuff that happened in the last year that I was there that just kind of made me want to, “Okay, maybe I’m just going to be a foster for people for awhile, and step back from those roles.”
What would you do if the teams played each other? Would you just pick a team?
So it was one of those things where it was like, who asked first? So if A-Town and Watertown were playing against each other, of course the Sugar Beaters were one of the closest teams to them, so if they were playing against each other, it was who was gonna ask you first, and that’s who you would go for, you know? You would have to, because, “I’m sorry, they asked me first!” So that was always a hard decision. I’ve played more games against my derby wives than I’ve ever played with my derby wives.
When you’re out on the track, how would you describe your derby playing style?
I feel like I’m very aggressive, and my aggressiveness tends to send me to the penalty box a lot. We all know, we’ve all seen it. I feel like I have very good track awareness, so because of my track awareness—and I can only, I can say that Bush has better track awareness than me, but I feel like me and Bush are bookends: you know, I’m lane 1, she’s lane 4; I’m lane 4, she’s lane 1. I feel like my track awareness ends up getting me those bigger hits that you see. I have been kicked out of the game for hitting someone too hard (which there’s no such thing in roller derby, unless it’s malicious—it wasn’t, it wasn’t malicious) but I have been told that, you know, that was a little too hard.
But I just, I get into that mindset of it’s just like playing softball. You don’t want that ball to get past you, so you do anything you can possibly do. You don’t want that jammer past you, so you do what you have to do to make sure, and if there are times where I’ll hit a jammer, and I know I’ve hit them so hard, that even I go, “Oh God, did I do that? I’m so sorry!” But in the end, it’s about, you know, roller derby is aggressive. Roller derby is a contact sport, and the girl that got me kicked out of that game, I told her, this is a contact sport. You would do it to me if you had the chance to do it to me.
I do love—more than anything—hitting a jammer and the whole crowd going, “Ooooh!” That pumps me up so good because I may not be the fastest, I obviously cannot jam, we’ve all seen it, so when I can do that and give my team a time to either get back together, regroup, refocus, then I feel like I’ve accomplished something.
So kind of with that, with people who might be intimidated by, you know, how aggressive we can be out there, what advice would you give for people who want to play roller derby?
Don’t ever think that you’re too old, you’re too big, you’re too skinny, you’re too small, you’re too anything. I had the pleasure of playing with a woman who was 75 years old. She was, at the time, the oldest active skater in the US, and she was badass. So I always say, when people say, “Well, I don’t know how to skate!” We teach you. You know, everything can be taught. Everybody is taught how to do this. I did not walk into roller derby and be the skater I am today. Obviously it takes years to get some of the skills or you know you have those epiphanies like, “Man, it’s taken me five years to learn that!” Don’t ever think that anything about yourself could prevent you from playing roller derby, because I have played with small people, I have played with big people, I have played with older people, I have played with people that are freshly out of high school, eighteen-year-olds. I have played with a dynamic—I have played with men, there’s no reason why you cannot try roller derby. There’s physically—everybody can do it.
Amen! So how did you decide on your skater name and number?
Oh, it was the biggest ordeal of my life! This was harder than naming my four children. I had never had to name myself. So backstory: originally I grew up in Las Vegas. I moved there as a teen and Las Vegas is home, so I threw around all these Las Vegas themed names. There were so many of them. I put on Facebook, “Hey I joined roller derby and I made the team, and I need suggestions, and I want it to be something that is hometown related, or something that has my name in it” (because my name is kind of a unique name). So I put it out, and I’m gonna tell you right now that, there at one point, there were 82 different roller derby names that people had given me! My brother, my oldest brother, Bryan, had given me so many derby names that I couldn’t even pick the best one out of it.
So when it came down to it, being from Las Vegas, Sin City, of course, I wanted to rep being from Las Vegas. So that’s where the “Sin City” came from. The “Rebel” part is a two part: the UNLV Rebels, that’s the college team, you know cause at the time that’s all Las Vegas had was a college team (there was no football or hockey or anything like that back then). So I ended up going with “Rebel,” but also because me myself, I’m a little bit of a rebel. I always have been in my life. My family says I just wing everything, so that’s why I was like, Rebel was definitely what I was going for. So Sin City Rebel it became, with the thought in my head that everybody was going to call me Rebel.
Because I was going to ask about that, how you feel about us calling you Sin!
First day it literally was—one of the girls came up to me, one of the girls that had been a vet on the team. She came up to me and said, “What’s your roller derby name?” And I said, “Sin City Rebel.” And she goes, “Alright, Sin! That’s what you are!” And I was like, “I—but I—I kind of wanted to be called Rebel?” But as I’ve gotten into playing roller derby more, there are a lot of Rebels out there, so maybe Sin is okay. And my number is the area code of Las Vegas, number 702.
But I also have another roller derby name that I recently got when I joined Mayhem. I went back to that post that my brother, and my name being Rhiannon, he had said that my roller derby name should have been Rhiactor. That’s the best one he thought he had come up with. So when I joined Mayhem, I had seen a couple of other girls that had joined Mayhem had different derby names on Mayhem. So I was like, for my brother, I decided to take Rhiactor, so that is my derby name. At the beginning, my number was 82, which was the year I was born, but I messed up when I made my jersey last year and ended up with 702 again, because I didn’t think about it when I was putting all the information in, and just was like, “Number? Yeah, 702!” So I’ve got the two derby names, and I feel like, when I’m on Mayhem, I feel a little bit of a different skater because of the guys playing against the guys and stuff like that, so I feel like the name kind of fits me in the co-ed situation.
You mentioned that it was easier to name your kids than to name yourself—what do your kids think of you as a derby player?
My kids think I’m pretty badass! They have always been my biggest fans (next to my little sister, of course, my sister Shelby is #1 fan) but they have always been there, they travel with me when I go to travel games. My son still lives up in North Dakota, so I send him pictures or show him anything that I can of, “Hey, we played this game today,” and give him updates and stuff, and you know, so they think I'm a pretty badass mom. They tell everybody that I play roller derby, and so it’s very, it makes me feel really good that I can share that with them, and that they don’t think it’s lame, and that they think that it’s cool. I’m pretty sure that I will have—my girls will probably play roller derby one day.
Who would you like to nominate for next month, and what do you want to ask?
Let’s pick Madam Bomb. How does she get ready for a bout, and how does she always keep her hair looking so magnificent all of the time?
Thanks for a great conversation Sin! We’re so lucky to have you as a part of Hard Knox! Readers, you will be able to see her and the rest of the league in action for our first home bout on May 20. Until next time, be like Sin and stay calm even when everything around you is pure chaos.
- smalls-