Roller Derby players collide in Columbia

By half time, the Columbia web designer was hooked and had to join up.

“I said to myself, ‘I have to do this,” said Foussat. “I didn’t know how to skate. I’d never played a sport. I wasn’t athletic, but I had to do it.”

Skaters forget about their 9-to-5 jobs when they pull on their fishnet stockings and helmets, lace up their skates and roar around a circular rink, shoulder-blocking and hip -bumping other skaters as fans scream from the sidelines.

A victory Saturday night at the Jamil Temple was particularly sweet when the league’s all-star team maintained its undefeated season record, defeating a high-profile Austin, Texas rival team, the Honky Tonk Heartbreakers, that helped usher in a new era of flat track roller derby a decade ago.

For Foussat, who also serves as the league’s marketing director, the roller derby scene is part competition, part fun and all girl power.

“It’s an embodiment of feminism in my mind,” Foussat said who also serves as the league’s marketing director. “I love that all these women come from all different walks of life. We all have different body shapes and different sizes. I love the idea that it doesn’t matter who you are, where you’ve been or where you’re going. We come together with this one thing in common. We can make you whatever you want to be.”

And the range of people drawn to the sport is wide.

All-star team captain Stacey Russell-Franklin is a figure skater while co-captain Mel Engle is an aquatic biologist.

And Coach Joel Samuels is a USC law school professor inspired by the athleticism of his players and the growing sense of community growing around the sport. Saturday, dozens of fans tailgated in the parking lot while others waited in a line that snaked around the building.

“For some people, they come once and it’s enough. But for others, they become fans of the sport and the athletes and we see them every time,” said Samuels aka Sonny Pro Bono.

Despite the tutus and garter belts, roller derby is a serious sport with rules.

Broken into 60-minute bouts, five players per team compete in a series of “jams.”

With the blow of the referee’s whistle, packs from the two teams skate around the track.

A second whistle signals a player from each team, called “jammers,” to begin to skate with the goal of lapping around the other players.

It can get pretty rowdy, but it’s all for a good cause.

The Columbia QuadSquad, one of six S.C. leagues, raises thousands of dollars each year for local charities including the Women’s Shelter and Harvest Hope Food Bank.

League charity director Jennifer Osment aka May Q. Panic was one of a group of league skaters who shaved her head in March to raise money for childhood cancer research.

“We can get rough on the floor but we are there for each other in a heart beat and there to help out the community,” she said.