As I've noted, I do a lot of reading on derby. Today, I was reading the lovely Bonnie D. Stroir's blog when I came across some of her typically wonderful advice. It was this: "Love derby on your own terms. Leave derby on your own terms." It really struck a chord.
I've seen a lot of people leave the sport in just the past two years. Many of the reasons are legitimate: a shattered ankle requiring years of rehabilitation; lack of time to commit to a team; lack of money to commit to a team. I've also seen some pretty stupid reasons, though- having a personal problem with someone and quitting the sport rather than working it out; misinterpreting a teammates' comment and leaving the team over it; not liking the way a league was run, but never making suggestions or offering to help change it for the better.
I want for myself what Bonnie describes. I do love derby on my own terms, and when I leave the sport, as I inevitably will, it will be because I know it's time for me to do so, whether because of my job, my body, or whatever it ends up being. I don't feel very sympathetic for people who leave the sport because of other people, because you should never let others choose for you what you should choose for yourself. You should never let others control your destiny. But what if you didn't have much of a choice?
I know that I've written a great deal already about the dissolution of my last league, but I feel that that single act has had far-reaching consequences. There are lessons that I'm still unpacking from it, the most important of which is that this sport is about the joy and the challenge of competition- anyone who makes it about more than that is unnecessarily and perhaps maliciously over-complicating it. I've felt guilty about very little, until I read that quote.
The whole messy story of Ember's ousting as President and Coach of the league isn't worth recounting in any detail. Its atmosphere was a toxic soup of negativity from all sides, mostly, if the truth is told, spurred by Ember's control of and responsibility for way too much of the league. She put herself under unnecessary stress because she believed none of us were capable of handling the burdens of running the league. And then she turned around and took that unnecessary stress out on us. She really felt like it was our fault. In some cases, maybe it was. But there were plenty of people willing to work hard to maintain the league, if she had only been willing to concede that their ideas had merit.
I don't know why she wanted so much control when it brought her such misery. She admitted time and again that she was stressed and miserable, unable to enjoy skating because so much else was hanging over her head. It seemed, though, to be part of Ember's idea of the President: the President of the league sacrifices untold hours of her day, every day, to keep things moving, to solve problems, and to take the burdens onto her own shoulders. That was one of the biggest disagreements she and I had after I took over as President- I believed then, and still firmly believe, that a league President should do her job, but that her job does not include giving up her entire life for derby to the point that it becomes distracting while she's on the job and starts pulling at the seams of her marriage.
Whatever the reason, her control was what tore the team apart. First, the three skaters who had the worst problems with her left. Once they left, I think we'd all hoped for a resolution. We'd all hoped that, eventually, we'd be able to mend fences and put the team back together. That was before the skaters who left decided to start a competing league. In the very small city of Montgomery, every single one of us left on BnB knew: there was no way two teams were going to work when one was barely breaking even, and fighting tooth and nail to bring in maybe 2 or 3 new skaters every few months.
I say every single one of us; Ember was the exception. I remember her telling us that if we really felt like the other team had such a recruiting and organizational advantage over us, it was because we were weak. Too weak to fight for the team that we loved. It was insulting at the time, and it still is, if only because, knowing the women on that team as I did and still do, none of us are weak. We all shoulder countless burdens in our real lives, and derby was supposed to be the release. The sanctuary. Once the sanctuary collapsed, what options did we have?
We knew what we were facing: the only way that the members who left the team would have come back to it was for us to kick Ember off the team. The problem was that, with Ember being responsible for so much on the team, and admittedly making herself into its central figure, too many people felt obligated. Ember was the person who had first taught them their falls, their hits, their t-stops and crossovers. How could they turn around and kick Ember off of the team that she started? How could they take away the joy of roller derby from the person who had brought them into it?
Those were the questions many people faced when we decided to take our league hiatus. Morale was at the lowest I'd ever seen it by that point. Fewer and fewer people were coming back to each practice, and people had actually started outright crying during drills because nobody could hold in the feeling that this was it. Every one of us but Ember felt like it was over. I often asked myself why she was blind to those feelings. Why didn't our feelings matter to her? Why couldn't she see what we were up against?
Nobody would kick her off the team. We knew that much. Nobody could even stomach asking for that vote. What we did know was that, during the meeting we voted on our hiatus, Ember walked out on our concerns. Before the meeting was even over, Ember told us she was leaving because it was pissing her off, and she walked out on us. That was a clear enough indicator of what she thought of us and our concerns. It was a visceral, gut-twisting slap in the face.
That, as much as any other reason, was why we ended up voting to close the league. With that choice, we said what nobody wanted to say, but there's little point in mincing words now. Facing a potential lawsuit, losing money on practice, with less than ten people on the team and little prospect of recruiting, if Ember wouldn't acknowledge the problems she had created, then our team would fold. In closing it ourselves, we voted no confidence in her- her ideas, her leadership, her stubborn denial. But we also knew the consequences: that she would no longer be able to skate.
I've had difficulty with that part of the moral choice. As I've said, and little of it bears repeating, my relationship with my derby wife was, at that point, beyond repair. We were little more than acquaintances, and she resented my leadership as much as she resented everything else about me. Through all the bad blood, all the terrible decisions that she made and then denied, I never wanted to take this away from her. I never wanted to do the equivalent of saying 'you can't ever play this sport in this state again.' But I did.
That's the bald truth of it, and it's what Bonnie's blog reminded me of. That, for all practical purposes, we had taken away Ember's chance to play roller derby. We took away her ability to leave derby on her own terms.
It's easy enough to say that it was karma, that Ember got the end result of two years' worth of bridge burning in the local area. She couldn't go back to her first team because of the way she'd left it, and because she had too much pride to admit that she'd treated them like shit too. Could she have been honest and forthright about that, I think things might have changed- or they might not have. BCR might have accepted the apology, but said it was too much of a risk to team stability to have her back. I don't know, and I can't speculate.
It was an easy choice for the rest of us to make; we all knew we had options. We could skate with either River Region or BCR, and we knew that with both teams, the doors were wide open for us. They weren't for Ember. We knew that too. The question I still have trouble answering is this: were we selfish? Or did we do what, in the end, was best for everyone? Did we force Ember's hand, or is this, in the end, how she's chosen to leave derby?
There aren't easy answers. The whole thing was unsettling, difficult, and depressing, and I certainly don't deny Ember her anger over not being able to skate again. That, more than probably anything else, is why she told me, the last time I talked to her, that I had "stabbed her in the back." That, in the end, is why she doesn't speak to me- because I'm the easy target. I was the one in charge when the league voted to close. In her mind, I could have stopped it, because in her mind, letting the team have a voice about its future was always a huge mistake, and she told me as much on one occasion. I couldn't run things that way. I couldn't continue to see my teammates suffer.
In the end, I chose to hurt one teammate rather than ten times that amount. But I was their captain, their advocate, their listening ear. I was their pivot, their protector, the person who always had their back. It was my job to take care of them. And I think I'm still having a hard time getting over the fact that the only options I had would have hurt someone, like it or not.
