Introducing New England Roller Derby Report

On April 12th, 2014 I attended my first roller derby bout. My wife had wanted to go and suggested we make the trip over. I had the pleasure of watching Bangor Roller Derby take on Pair O’ Dice City rollers. Bangor took the win 287-50.

New England Roller Derby Report

Chad Nute

It took a while for me to understand what was happening. My prior experience had only been the made for tvRockin Roller Games” of the late 80s. It wasn’t all that relevant. We quickly saw there was nothing gimmicky about today’s roller derby. The players were exceptional athletes playing because they loved the sport. In fact, it felt like the purest sporting even I had seen in years.

After that first game I googled a few hundred different websites and found the game play answers I was looking for. What I didn’t find was much in the way of local derby “News”. I found a few well written human interest stories and video clips but nothing that was telling me scores or recaps.

Over the next few months we took in more derby. We became hooked. We took in games at Central Maine Derby, Rock Coast Rollers, Aroostook Roller Derby and Maine Roller derby games. One day, I asked my wife if she thought maybe we could start writing some things out; perhaps we could begin the coverage the sport and its participants deserved. We started with the basics, facebook and some tweets.

Mid-Summer 2014, things broke open. While covering the “Maine Event” hosted by the Rock Coast Rollers, fans of the newly formed Aroostook Roller Derby team devoured every tweet that was posted. Our update on the ARD vs Breakwater Blackhearts was seen thousands of times. To this day it remains our most viewed stories. We realized that what we were really doing was providing the away team fans a way of keeping up with their team.

That’s when I thought we could go bigger and do something nobody was really doing; at least east of the Mississippi. I asked myself ‘Why can’t I stream an audio play by play?”

Technology has come a long way since I attended the New England School of Communication in the mid 90’s. I found www.mixlr.com and it looked like exactly the radio streaming I wanted. It didn’t take long before I’d pieced together a ‘broadcast in a backpack’ consisting of my iPhone a special adapter and condenser mic.

The broadcast grew in popularity and in size. Since those early days we’ve gone from over 70 live audio streams to now a full-fledged video production. We’ve covered games from New Brunswick to Massachusetts and even a national tournament in Pennsylvania.

What we miss however is the written word. This blog will be a missing companion piece to our program; the in depth look we can take and in turn, report on. So here you’ll find it. We will be covering not only bouts here in Maine but also New England and New Brunswick.