
For the past hour, 10 women have been running drills around the Miami Roller Rink in the suburbs of Kendall. Some are married. Others have children. A handful sport tattoos. They’re a rambunctious squad of varying ages, sizes, races, nationalities, and orientations. They share little in common except for this: a certain collective joy created by aggressively ramming through a crowd of bodies and then weaving their way around a flat, oval track on roller skates. It’s this very specific type of gratification that has led them to strap on their pads and lace up their skates at Vice City Rollers’ derby practice at 8 p.m. on a Tuesday.
“You might be kicking a lot of butt or getting your ass whooped—but at the end of the day you’re thankful,” explains Jessica “Shakesfear” Campusano, the league’s training director, who joined Vice City Rollers in 2011. “You don’t really know what you’re made of until you’re tested. Derby will not only bring that out of you but [it will] make you realize it was always there.”

Tonight, the women—armored with knee pads, elbow pads, wrist guards, mouth guards, and helmets—have whizzed around the rink forward and backward, and glided through turns with Michelle Kwan–like grace. That being said, Campusano has also been directing them to run on their toe stops and skid laterally across the laminated wood floors, creating bone-chilling squeaks that echo across the empty rink. They’re in the midst of a blocking drill when veteran derby skater Jessica “Jess Roll With It” Gomez (who has more than 20 years of experience) slams into relative newbie Elise “Sheikah Freak” Lorenzo with the brute force of a runaway train. Once Lorenzo gets her bearings, she can’t help but shake her head admiringly as Gomez speeds past.
“When you get hit really good, you can’t even be mad,” Lorenzo says with a slight lisp from her mouth guard. “You’re just like, ‘Ey, good job!’”

Roller derby can seem a lot like football: players from two teams line up and, at the mark, collide into each other to prevent the other team from advancing. It’s full-contact and it’s brutal: bruises are a given and tales of broken ankles, shattered collar bones, and torn ACLs abound. But that’s where the similarities between the two sports end.
Instead of running onto a field in turf cleats, roller derby participants take the track on retro, four-wheeled skates. Instead of a quarterback, each team (comprised of five players) elects a “jammer,” who pins a star to their helmet. And instead of moving in opposing directions to score points at either end of the field, all players skate counterclockwise and form packs that block the jammer from the opposing team. The goal? Keep the jammer from breaking through and making it around the rink. Because once a jammer completes a lap, they score a point for each player from the opposing team that they pass.

“When I first signed up, I thought this was going to be a skating fitness club,” says Alexandra “Vixen Wreckher” Uribe, who joined the league in 2017 and serves as president of Vice City Rollers. “Now I’ve seen it all: broken ankles, broken knees, dislocated shoulders, broken clavicles, broken wrists, concussions, broken noses—all of this is typical.”
Surprisingly, it’s not masochism that draws women to roller derby. It’s the camaraderie and sisterhood forged through the inherent grit of the sport. Though roller derby dates back to the 1880s, it didn’t gain much recognition until the twenty-first century, when the 2009 film Whip It—starring Elliot Page as a rebellious teen who joins a roller derby team in small-town Texas—put this small-but-mighty sport under Hollywood’s limelight. South Florida’s first roller derby team, Gold Coast Derby Girls, was founded in 2007 in Fort Lauderdale. In 2011, two members splintered off and formed a new team farther south: Vice City Rollers. Today, it remains Miami’s first and only roller derby team. And as both teams’ rosters grew so too did their rivalry.

“The games against Gold Coast were really hard on us as a team,” Campusano recalls. “They had higher-skill players and had been around for longer. We were the underdogs.”
But the Miami team was scrappy from the get-go. Without a consistent venue to host practices, skaters would meet up at Tropical Park at night and park their cars in a semi-circle, leaving their headlights on to illuminate the parking lot and their makeshift rink. From there, they graduated to the Suniland Roller Hockey Rink, an aging outdoor track near The Falls that left them skating in the searing heat.

By 2020, the team had grown to 24 eligible skaters. Both player performance and spectator attendance were steadily improving. Many members believed it was only a matter of time before Vice City Rollers, a recreational league, would join the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA)—the international governing body for the sport—allowing them to play in sanctioned games, place in rankings, and compete in play-off and championship tournaments. That is until the COVID-19 pandemic brought the sport to a screeching halt.

With practices and games cancelled for the foreseeable future, Vice City Rollers’ membership plummeted. By 2022, they were down to two or three skaters. “We were in the red and [our team leadership] had to have the difficult conversation about shutting down the business,” recalls Campusano, explaining that without members paying dues, the storage costs for the team’s equipment had become untenable.
The problem wasn’t unique to Vice City Rollers. All around the world, roller derby leagues faced similar pandemic-created issues of dwindling membership and mounting expenses. Take the All City Rollers, for example. The league formed in Lake City, Florida, in 2011, and shuttered in July 2023. “As much as we tried, we never quite got our wheels back under us following the global events of 2020,” the team’s social media post read.

But Campusano and Uribe didn’t relent. By the time derby practices and lessons for beginners (affectionately referred to as “fresh meat”) started picking back up in 2022, Uribe had stepped in as president. With new leadership, a new way forward revealed itself: joining forces with their biggest rival, the Gold Coast Derby Girls.

“If you guys don’t have the numbers and we don’t have the numbers, why aren’t we collaborating?” Campusano recalls thinking. “Why don’t we put our heads together and figure out how we can make both of us thrive?”
Don’t be fooled by all the aggression at roller derby bouts. Underlying all the eye black and trash talk is a shared set of values to which all skaters abide that centers inclusivity and acceptance regardless of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, ability, language, or socioeconomic status. As an organization, WFTDA has pledged its commitment to promoting diversity, explicitly stating that members who identify as transgender or gender-expansive are fully eligible to participate so long as “women’s flat track roller derby is the version and composition of roller derby with which they most closely identify.”

For some women and girl skaters, roller derby is the first time they’re given permission to focus on what their bodies can do—as opposed to what their bodies look like.
“When I first started [roller derby], there was a coach who was constantly telling me to stop ‘falling pretty,’” says Uribe, who racked up eight years of training as a figure skater before she joined Vice City Rollers. “When you’re figure skating, it’s all about having a smile on your face. If you make a mistake, even if you fall, [you have] to pretend it didn’t hurt. I needed to change the way I was trying to look flawless and upright all the time and switch to the derby position—keeping your chest low and always ready to take a hit.”

The WFTDA counts 445 roller derby teams across six continents, and there’s believed to be hundreds more recreational leagues worldwide. For skaters, it’s become a vast sisterhood—one that Vice City Rollers and Gold Coast Derby Girls understood was too sacred to jeopardize. As both leagues rebuilt their rosters in the wake of the pandemic, they decided to band together. In 2023, the teams opened their practices to skaters from either league. To take it a step further, they formed a geographic team called SoFlo Riders, an umbrella recreational league comprised of skaters from both leagues and even a few skaters from Fort Myers Roller Derby, making it easier to play scrimmages among themselves.
“It’s a marked difference from, ‘We’re going to come here to beat you guys up,’ to now, ‘We’re friends and in each other’s communication channels,’” Campusano says. A handful of Vice City Rollers teammates even attended a Gold Coast Derby Girls watch party for the WFTDA Global Championships in early November.

Because roller derby scrimmages require five players per team, 10 is the magic number of skaters that each practice requires for coaches to hold a mock bout. Before the pandemic and with rosters in the double digits, five-by-five scrimmages were common at practice. These days—and at Tuesday’s practice at the Miami Roller Rink—they’re cause for celebration and stand as a testament to the sport’s staying power locally.
“Being able to do those five-on-fives allows skaters to really feel what the actual game is like,” Uribe explains. “It’s so much better.”
“And this is all thanks to the partnership with Gold Coast,” adds Campusano, pointing out at least two skaters who had driven from Broward County on a weekday night to practice. “In 2025, we’ll only be taking the team to higher and higher levels of competition.”
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