River City Q&A: Dee Laureta

Confessions of a ROLLER DERBY QUEEN!  This month I’m delighted to present a “River City Q&A” with roller-babe Dee Laureta, one of the top players on Powell River’s roller derby team, the Pow Town Brawl Stars.

In the interview Dee discusses her passion for roller derby and she reports on the current state of the team.  But we also get into loads of other hot topics too including being hassled by the cops, death waves and even the eventual fate of mankind.  And of course I asked her to tell us what she loves and hates about this magnificent town.  Plus, be sure to check out the video on my home page to see highlights of our interview as well as Dee in action in the rink!

Callum Houston:  Can I ask what age you are?

Dee Laureta:  I’m twenty-seven.

CH:  Which generation are you?

DL:  Eighties to early nineties is my generation I would for sure say, even though I was a little bit younger.  I was born in eighty-eight, but I would say mid eighties to, like, early nineties even though I was really young.  My sister closest to me is eleven years older so she introduced me to a lot of music and that influenced the generation that I identify with more.  I’m definitely before the millennium, definitely, because that’s when, like, the technology changed.  It’s more techy now I find.

CH:  Where are you from originally?

DL:  I was born in New Westminster.  I lived my first five years of life in Vancouver and then moved here and have lived here ever since.  So I would have to say I’m from here, Powell River.

CH:  You spent some time growing up in the big city.  Which was the better place to grow up in and why was it better?

DL:  Oh here, definitely, Powell River.  When I was small -- like my daughter’s age, she’s six and a half -- my sister, before we would go to a park, would do a walk-around and make sure that there were no needles and she’d make sure I knew about stranger danger and creepers and weirdos.  Here, I knew all that stuff, but because I was more street smart, when I came here I was like, Oh wow!  I can just go to the park, I can ride my bike to school and nobody says anything!  So I noticed right away the difference between here and there.  So that’s why when I moved back here having my daughter, she could be a kid here and I didn’t want to have her in the city where she’d have to be really worried about everything.

CH:  You play on the local roller derby team, the Pow Town Brawl Stars.  What’s your player name and number?

DL:  My player name is Sweet Dee, spelled just like my name, D E E.  My number is 579.

CH:  When did you join the team?

DL:  Two years ago actually.  Two years ago almost to the day, I’d say.

CH:  Did you have any roller derby experience before you joined?

DL:  None.  Just watching the movies.

CH:  What made you decide to get into the sport of roller derby?

DL:  I have a slight temper [Dee laughs] and I was in a pivotal moment in my life where I was kinda like I need to do something for me that’s in sport.  I used to play baseball, I’ve done soccer, injuries from both.  And I thought, You know what?  I wanna do roller derby.  It seems pretty constructive as an outlet where everybody’s friendly and they’re not mad at you for hitting them.  [Dee laughs.]

CH:  The game of roller derby is a little bit complicated.  Could you explain how it works?  What’s the object of the game?

DL:  In a nutshell you have four blockers from each team on the track at the start line and then each team fields one jammer.  A jammer wears a star on their head.  As the jammer your object is to get through and before the opposing jammer, so you need to get through all of their blockers and ahead of them and complete your first initial lap around the track to establish that you are the lead jammer.  How you get the points is by passing the hips of the opposing team.

CH:  Is the jammer always one specific team player?

DL:  Yes and no.

CH:  Have you ever been the jammer?

DL:  I have.  I refer to myself as a blocker who jams sometimes.  It takes a lot of mental and physical strength to be a jammer.  There’s a lot of mind games in roller derby.  A lot.  Whether you go in stone cold and try to get at them that way, like, I’m just hard and you can’t get to me.  Or mine is, I’m not really a jammer, so when I get out of the jam line I’m like do-do-do and having fun and then all of a sudden I’m JAM!  And they’re like “Whoa, we weren’t expecting that because she was so nonchalant about it” even though I’ve just become a little bit more successful in my jamming.  So you can then just have a jammer, somebody who says “I never block, I’m just your jammer, only field me as a jammer.”  There’s a couple people like that.  One to particularly look out for, she plays for the Eves of Destruction or she plays for the Vancouver Island All Stars, is Sara Gorn.  She’s -- oh my god -- amazing!  If you YouTube some of her stuff, it’s crazy!  Apex jumps like nobody’s business.  And then she’s got a really good story behind her as well of how she entered derby too.  So she’s one of my derby crushes.  I always said that, like, oh, she’s just amazing!

CH:  What’s it like playing on the team?

DL:  Oh, it’s interesting.  There’s so many personalities, so many -- some multiple!  [Dee laughs.]  We have one man on our team and he does a good job at not dying every day.  [Dee laughs.]

CH:  So it’s not a strictly female team?

DL:  There are strictly female teams.  We have a couple that we have to leave him out of our roster when we play them which he’s okay with because there’s only one.  If we were half-and-half or sixty-forty we would be considered a hundred percent coed team.  With only having Matt he can pull out and just be like “Sorry, I’m gonna step back so you guys can have this opportunity to play.”  But yeah, he’s in a room full of women ninety percent of the time as well as he has two kids, two daughters, so he does a very good job at not pissing everybody off.  And we also have juniors too.  So our juniors have to be a special brand to kind of mesh with the adults that are -- we’re all crazy, we’re all crazy!

CH:  How big is roller derby right now?  What kinds of crowds do you get coming out to games?

DL:  I would say in general roller derby has changed.  It’s not bank track so much anymore as it is flat track which is new for people.  So it’s re-establishing itself.  In Powell River I would say, going on our fifth year, people still go “Powell River has a roller derby team?”  We’re building, we’re getting there.  We have our new facility now which puts us right in the eye of the public.  It’s right on Joyce Avenue by Lordco, so we have windows, people see us three nights a week in there practicing as well as we have the people that want to squeeze in on our space.  But we’re getting more known.  We had an official ribbon-cutting with the mayor which was really awesome.  CaroleAnn Leishman was a huge influence in us getting that building.  So yeah, it was awesome.  So now we’re just trying to maintain and hold onto that building.

CH:  That’s quite a high profile location for your team.

DL:  Extremely.  Yeah, definitely.  This is gonna sound kind of like boasting but in all of the leagues between Sunshine Coast, Vancouver Island and Vancouver, we’re the only team that has that type of facility.  We have people now that are more willing to travel to Powell River because of our facility.

CH:  So the town of Powell River has really gotten behind the roller derby team in a big way.

DL:  Between CaroleAnn Leishman, our mayor pushing for us and then by extension talking to Jack Barr who owns the building there, if it weren’t for those three people I don’t think we would be where we are.  We lost our space at Oceanview High School so we would’ve had nowhere to skate at all.  So it was really like, we found out about the space two weeks before we were supposed to start our season.  So it was like “Oh my god, this is happening???”  So a lot of eager, happy thoughts and trying to pull it together so we all had to reel ourselves in and say “Okay, let’s just take one step at a time here.”  So this year will be a big season for us.  We’re gonna try and do more stuff to get the public to know about us and be able to come.

CH:  The team travels to play games in other towns right?  Where else do you play?

DL:  Towns and teams we frequent would definitely be on Vancouver Island.  We play Rink Minx, Brick House Betties, Harbour City, Brass Knuckles and the Committed out of Salt Spring.  So those are places we’ve gone to.  I’ve gone as far as Chilliwack to play in what was first called Day of Derby.  It was one day, four to six hundred skaters coming from everywhere and I went and played as Sunshine Coast, I didn’t play as Pow Town Brawl Stars.  And then this year I had the pleasure of going to Days of Derby in Chilliwack which was two complete days of roller derby.  I amped up my gameplay; I had four games to play and again I played for Brass Knuckles instead of playing for Pow Town.  It’s an individual sport as well as it is a team sport.  So as Pow Town, yes, we’ve gone to play the Rink Minx, we’ve played all the other teams I already said as well as going and playing Sunshine Coast.  This year we’re trying to broaden our horizons with different teams other than those core teams.  So that’s interesting.  We have a couple opportunities to play with Prince George on the Island in fall and Terrace coming here, so that’ll be something to look forward to.

CH:  What’s your favorite roller derby movie?

DL:  Whip It.  The standard, Whip It.  Yeah, it’s the underdog story; she comes in, she doesn’t know where she belongs and then she finds a team and she fits in and is accepted.  So it’s like that standard, kind of go-through-the-motions.  Definitely.  Totally not applicable to roller derby today.

CH:  Why not?

DL:  Oh, so many more rules.  There’s no elbowing and punching and, well, bank track for one.  There’s no clotheslining and the partying.  And the lesbian ratio.  Like, all these things that are heavily played up in those movies that aren’t, I mean, aren’t really that relevant.  Not every girl that plays roller derby is a lesbian.  There’s male teams, not all of them are gay.

CH:  The clichés.

DL:  Exactly.  And that, you know, roller derby’s SO dangerous.  It’s no more dangerous than rugby, football, soccer, all those things.  I fractured my knee playing soccer, I have a torn shoulder from baseball.

CH:  Have you injured yourself playing roller derby?

DL:  Other than muscles, no.  I’ve watched my cousin snap her leg.  I watched a player spiral fracture her leg.  Yeah, it happens.  But I’ve also seen my friend step off the sidewalk and break her ankle.  So it’s just re-establishing a lot of the misconceptions.