Reflections on My First Year of DerbyLife

A few years ago, my derby team went to Portland for a tournament. We played against Rose City, Rat City, and Bay Area Derby Girls in a fabulously well-run event at Rose’s home venue. After that, I went on a road trip, and was grateful to my foes of the previous weekend, Rat City, for inviting me to practice with them when I drove through Seattle. Throughout my five years playing derby, I have consistently been struck by the kindness and generosity of derby people, who have universally been willing to host a stranger whose only common ground is love of derby.

That road trip crystallized my desire to learn more about the people of derby and share their stories, in spite of the great differences and distance between many leagues. For a while, my vision involved quitting my job and driving cross-country, meeting and skating with and profiling teams that I met. Then I realized two things: one, I liked my job (and the health insurance it provided), and two, I didn’t really have a vehicle for sharing those imagined stories. I turned this problem over in my mind, but not being technical seemed like a huge impediment to creating something online.

Not too long after that, Hurt Reynolds and I picked up the thread of a conversation we’d been having since we met in 2009. He told me that he and a varied group of derby lovers were working on something pretty cool.

Long story short, what we created became DerbyLife. Gnosis did the incredible coding, which is as easy to use on the back end as it is on the front end (for which I am profoundly grateful). Assaultin Pepa created a phenomenal design, which we all love. Hurt Reynolds has helped in innumerable ways, many of which even I don’t see or understand. MercyLess has tirelessly wrangled us all, rolling this beautiful boulder up the hill every day: selling ads, working with DNN and FiveOnFive, spreading the word to derby friends and contacts all over the world, managing writers and content, and so much more. And I have gotten to do what I love—talk to people about derby and help them refine and share their stories with the rest of the derby world.

This week one year ago, DerbyLife began publishing for the first time. We weren’t quite sure how we were going to find enough content to make it worth visiting the site week after week, but we believed in our mission: to share the derby and life stories of as many different derby people as possible, and to create a place for derby people from different leagues, backgrounds, ages, skill levels, and countries to connect and converse.

Looking back on the past year, I think we have succeeded far beyond my expectations on that first goal, sharing stories from new mothers, rookies, vets, junior derby skaters, men's derby skaters, flat and banked track skaters, refs, managers, support staff, fans, professional sportswriters, and people just discovering the sport. I would like to do even better in our second year. We’d love your help with that. If you feel like your story hasn’t been told, or you’d like to see more of something, let us know, or write something and send it to us—we love submissions. (You can send them to [email protected].)

I think we have a long way to go on our second goal. We’d really like people to feel like DerbyLife is a dialogue, not a series of monologues (though those certainly have their place). To that end, we’ll be creating some new features (more on that later this week) and trying to draw on the experience of the derby community more. We invite you to follow us on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/myderbylife) and Twitter (no, really--we'll start using this! http://twitter.com/myderbylife), which we’ll use to reach out and interact with the derby world more. We would also like to encourage more conversation in the comments section of our pieces, and will be running more open threads to give you a place to talk about what’s important to you.

To celebrate our one-year DerbyLife-a-Versary and where we’ve come from, today we’re going to reprise some of our very first articles. Wednesday, we’ll share our most popular pieces ever. And Friday, we’ll share some great new stuff to give you a taste of where we’re going.

In the last year, 275,000 people have visited DerbyLife over 600,000 times. We think that’s pretty incredible. Thank you for making our first year great. We can’t wait to see what our second year looks like.

Keep Rolling!
Em Dash
Managing Editor, DerbyLife