17-05-2025
A roller derby renaissance in Fresno? Meet the team bringing the sport back
Uniquely is a Fresno Bee series that covers the moments, landmarks and personalities that define what makes living in the Fresno area so special.
It's Tuesday night and Jodie Mettler is playing referee, calling out faux penalties to a dozen or so women as they skate close circles around the roller hockey rink at Fresno's Cary Park.
It's the last practice for Ash City Roller Derby before a weekend scrimmage in Los Angeles and the skaters are working on team skills like position, blocking and formations.
A tripod of players throw hip blocks in one direction, then shifts the other direction and clips a skater as she tries to take a wide roll around the group.
Mettler forgot her whistle, so she yells out a quick 'tweet,' forcing a skater off to the side of the rink to do 10 squats. This is a practice, after all.
After a few minutes of this work, the team huddles up to discuss the drill, then sets off to run it again.
'It's all game play tonight,' says Mettler, a founding member of Ash City Roller Derby who skates under the moniker Bae-Phomet. She's number 666, obviously.
Since July, Ash City Roller Derby has been working to revive the full-contact sport in Fresno.
The league's name is a double play on words: Ash, as in the tree, which in Spanish is Fresno; and also ash, as in the metaphorical remains from which the phoenix was reborn.
There was time when Fresno was a roller-derby town.
At one point, there were three teams in two separate leagues. Crowds were consistent, if not huge. Up to 1,000 people came out to watch matches at The Fresno Convention Center, and later the fairgrounds in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
In 2008, The Fresno Bee ran a week's worth of profiles of Smog City Roller Grrls in advance of a home match at the Fresno Convention Center. Columnist Mike Osegueda called the team's resident speedster, Betty Rocker, a 'certified roller derby star ... who might actually be the top sports star in Fresno right now.'
That team ended in 2008, but spawned a pair of others: NoTown Roller Derby and Valley Fever, the later of which morphed into the Central California Area Derby.
Mettler joined the NoTown team the week after she moved to Fresno in 2010. She skated under the name Cherry Pie (number 3.142). Finding the team was one of the first things she did in town.
'That was a priority.'
Roller Derby goes back nearly 100 years to days of banked-track endurance racing, but early versions of the sport as it's known now became popular in the 1950s and '60s first on radio and later on TV, where it evolved into a kind of professional wrestling on wheels.
A story in The Bee in 1956 announced a run of National Roller Derby League matches at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. There would be bouts three nights a week for 13 weeks.
League founder Leo Seltzer said he expected crowds of 9,000 a night.
When the league came to Fresno's Kearney Bowl in 1960 (the Bay Bombers faced off against the Los Angles Braves), an announcement ran in The Bee alongside a story on the Indy 500.
Eventually, the sport fell out of favor and by the 1980s was forgotten or only remembered with fond nostalgia.
That was until the 2000s, when it saw an underground revival, thanks to slew of documentaries and at least one major studio film, the Elliot Page feature 'Whip-It.'
That was Jessica Meredith's entry into the sport.
She'd skated before, the way kids do, but she wasn't an athlete. As a 20-year-old queer person of color, she was mostly looking for a community.
She found that in a derby team in Merced, where she was living at the time.
It was immediate, says Meredith, who skates under the name Afrodisiac.
'I, to this day, have not found an experience anything like that.'
That community and camaraderie is what led her to reach out on social media last summer. The sport had all but disappeared in Fresno during the pandemic and she wondered if anyone else wanted it back. 'We had no idea that other people felt the same way.'
Now, roller derby is by no means a mainstream sport.
The only way to really watch it live is in person (at scrimmages and more official matches set up by leagues across the country) or on Twitch.
'The joke is that ESPN will pick up fake horse riding before they'll pick up roller derby,' Mettler says.
For the uninitiated: This isn't the dystopian battle sport depicted in sci-fi films. There's no ball. Points are scored as one skater laps around a pack of defenders in a series of two-minute 'jams.' Bouts are run in two, 30-minute periods.
It isn't played on a banked-wood track (at least per the set of rules that Ash City plays under) and there isn't any fighting (staged or otherwise). It is still full-contact. Hip and body checks are allowed.
And things are less DIY then they were in the 2000s, when the majority of the sport was centered out of Texas (where it was insanely popular), Mettler says. Nowadays, there's an international world cup and the skaters look to be seen as the athletes they are.
So, it's not the speed competition that people might remember.
'It's a slower game,' Mettler says.
'It's strategic, right from the whistle.'
Ash City is still a new team with a mix of veterans and newbies.
Its matches are sanctioned by the The Women's Flat Track Derby Association, though Ash City is not yet an official member. That requires the organization to go through an apprenticeship program.
The team runs on $10 monthly dues, with no coaching staff and no official home rink (someplace with a roof and air conditioning where Ash City could schedule matches without concern for heat or rain). The club would love to get back inside the Fresno Fairgrounds, at least for match days, but there's an expense that makes that difficult, Mettler says.
So, the team (15 skaters, per its Instagram page) meets at Cary Park twice a week for practice. Some of the woman skate more. Meredith travels to Visalia twice a week to skate with the V Town Roller Derby team.
They also host boot camps to recruit and train new members. The last one ran six weeks and had 30 skaters.
On May 31, the team is hosting its first mixed-level hometown scrimmage. It start at 10 a.m. with a $5 suggested donation for spectators ($10 for those looking to compete).
Mostly, the skaters are out here just making it work, Meredith says, because none of them want to see the sport die again. 'We're here to stick around,' she says.
'When people think of roller derby in Fresno, I don't want it to ever be a question.'
