Roller girl

Erinn McCann, 33, also known as Sweet Ruin, started the Battle Born Derby Demons, a roller derby team. In her other life, she’s a dealer, specializing in poker for three years. For more information about the Battle Born Derby Demons, see www.battlebornderbydemons.com or call (775)815-3743.

Tell me about starting the roller derby team.

It started with fliers, me putting up fliers myself. Girls contacted me. It was basically getting e-mail addresses and setting up meetings, getting new-girl packets together. It just kind of happened from there.

How many bouts have you had?

We’ve had four, but we’re going to have our fifth in September. The date’s kind of tentative, but it’s going to happen sometime in September.

Have you been winning or losing?

We’re 4-0.

All right. How many more bouts this season?

Possibly two more, maybe three—with one in October. I’m not sure. It’s whatever our Secretary of Defense sets up. We’ll probably have one more home bout and maybe two away.

And when does the new season officially begin?

It depends on the team. Some girls, like Sacramento, their season starts in October. We bouted all summer long. It just depends. There’s really no particular season for roller derby. If we could do it all year long, we would.

Tell me what’s going on with the team these days.

Currently, we practice outdoors. The city of Reno lets us use the plaza, which is great, but winter is coming up, and we are looking for a place to practice indoors. We’re trying to find a warehouse or anything that would help us to continue doing derby because if we stop, it’s going to hinder us when we go into our next season. It’s possible we’ll lose the organization from us not being able to practice—we’ll lose girls if that happens.

Sure, they’ll find other things to do.

It’s not like softball.

Where have you tried? Have you tried, like, King Skate Country?

When we first started practicing last September, we practiced at Roller Kingdom. He wanted to charge us to practice, which we paid him, but his prices kept going up after each time we tried to negotiate. It went from $125 to $200, and that’s skating three times a week. At $200 per practice, that’s $2,400 a month. We weren’t even bringing that in in order to pay him that.

Right.

So we basically stopped practicing there, and we found another place to practice, which was a bar, Stoney’s. That bar just allowed us to do drills. We didn’t have enough room to really set up a track and play. We can’t really continue to practice at Stoney’s, either.

Why not practice at the city’s skating plaza?

During the wintertime, if it snows or if it rains, we can’t skate on it.

Obviously, you’ve checked all the venues you can think of. So you’re at the point you’re hoping someone will contact you.

We’re trying to get it out there to see if someone has something. We’re nonprofit, so it’ll be a tax write-off for them. We can’t pay them that much. We don’t know how much we can pay them until we see what’s in our budget, but obviously we can’t pay them $10,000 a month. That’s what a lot of warehouses are asking for their spaces.