All-Black women’s roller derby team wants to bring a little ‘Black magic’ to global championships

Black Derby Collective didn’t expect to be this good this soon.

Founded barely a year ago, the all-Black women’s roller derby team rarely gets to practice because its skaters live all over the United States. Yet, they have thrived anyway with a chemistry members have called “Black magic.”

Black Derby Collective (BDC) won a regional playoff tournament in May to qualify for the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA) Championships this week in Malmö, Sweden. It’s the first all-Black team to reach the championship tournament in the WFTDA, the highest level of women’s roller derby in the world.

Maisha Cerqueda, a blocker who goes by the nickname Queen Loseyateefah, said the team’s connection is special.

“I know it sounds magical or mystical or ‘give it to the universe,’ but I do have to say that there is just something karmically tied between us that when we play. There is a rhythm, there is chemistry,” the Atlanta resident said. “I intuitively kind of know what some players are going to do. The way we play complements each other.”

The team is so new that it was unclear whether it would be able to play enough games to qualify for the regional.

“As the ancestors would have it,” Cerqueda said.

Black Derby Collective made it with the minimum five games necessary to qualify for regionals. It won the regional playoff in Columbia, South Carolina, in May to earn a trip to the global championships.

While Black Derby Collective wants to succeed on the track, its purpose goes further.

Dariann Hewson, a blocker and pivot who lives in Indianapolis and goes by the nickname Diamond, said she hopes the team inspires inclusion in a largely white sport.

“The goal for me is making sure that the opportunity is open for anyone who wants to play roller derby to do it safely and comfortably, because it’s not comfortable for everybody,” Hewson said.

Cerqueda said BDC’s emergence hasn’t been completely smooth.

“Some people are resistant to the fact that there’s even a Black team in the [roller derby] space,” she said. “I hope what people take about it is that there’s no substitution for being with your people, having a space where someone uniquely understands your experience here.”

Hewson said playing with a competitive, all-Black team is a long way from her early days of playing noncompetitive roller derby on a predominantly white team in Anderson, Indiana.

“I played with a team that wasn’t ranked,” she said. “We had zero or minimal goals outside of just having a good time and showing up to the afterparty. If we lost the game, we won that.”

Hewson switched to an Indianapolis-based team to get better competition, and now she’s on a roller derby team with an Olympic gold medalist.

Speedskater Erin Jackson is best known for becoming the first Black woman to win an individual gold medal at the Winter Olympics, a feat she achieved in 2022 in Beijing. While she has been speedskating since 2017, she has been playing roller derby since 2012.

Though Jackson is currently injured and unable to compete, she enjoys simply being around Black Derby Collective.

“Just having that community on the team and on the track, being able to look left, look right, and then see people who look like you — it’s a really, really rare thing for what I do,” Jackson said.

Jackson has relished being a part of the team as its members build a connection.

“People who don’t really follow roller derby, they might not understand how impressive that is by just having all these skaters who can, in a way, read each other’s minds and know where to be and how to work together,” she said.

It’s not just about the players all being Black. Hewson said many of them didn’t fit into mainstream sports as kids and have found roller derby to be an outlet as adults. She said it’s also a place where quirkiness is welcome.

“I’m a little bit of a weirdo, so I never fit in with the normal sports. … I went to my first [roller derby] practice and met a lot of people who were very similar to me, a lot of people on the spectrum, and people who had similar brains to mine,” Hewson said. “So I love being able to be a part of a group of people.”

The players don’t get paid — BDC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit — and are making familial, career and financial sacrifices to fulfill their championship dreams.

“This one just feels different because I’m doing it with a group of people who may not have the opportunity where they’re at, and we have made a decision to do it together, no matter the cost, no matter the travel, no matter the time,” Hewson said.

Roller derby is known for players’ colorful nicknames. Other BDC nicknames include Blaxyl Rose, Poison Violet, Murda, Blacque Jac, PuRRfect, Ima Blow Bya and Trouble MakeHer.

Now this collection of Black skaters from cities such as Los Angeles, Seattle and Atlanta has a chance to pursue the Hydra — the trophy that goes to the world’s best team — after playing together for only five games, with no practice time.

“A lot of my teammates are younger in roller derby, so they don’t realize that this is not normal,” Cerqueda said. “You shouldn’t be able to just pull 20 people together and do amazing things if you don’t normally play together.

“If we can thread this needle and make this happen, it’ll be amazing. If we’re not able to do that, that’s totally fine, because we know it’s just our first year of being a team.”

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