Anyone who’s ever skated with Kayla Wilkins, co-captain of roller derby’s inaugural Team Canada, knows her lilliputian stature belies the inordinate strength of her hip check. Always perfectly placed on the oval track, Wilkins (known as Brim Stone at derby) rarely fails when she sets her sights on a hit, leaving its recipient feeling as though she’d been slugged by a bag of potatoes.
This rather niche skill is one of many that helped earn her spot on Team Canada, which will compete in the first-ever Roller Derby World Cup, beginning December 1 at Downsview Park.
For those who haven’t yet experienced the fast-growing modern version of roller derby, the game is one in which each team’s jammers (often very fast and nimble skaters) try to repeatedly lap a group of eight blockers, scoring a point for each opposing blocker they legally pass as they skate counterclockwise around the track. But that’s just the bare bones. The game is one that involves significant skating skill and strategy, as success depends on the ability to switch between offence and defence on a dime.
It’s a game that differs from previous incarnations of the sport, where elbows flew in a spectacle not unlike WWE. Modern roller derby involves contact rules similar to hockey, and there’s nothing fixed about it.
Since the World Cup takes place in a warehouse-like space local skaters lovingly call the Bunker, it won’t exactly be on par with FIFA for production values. It will, however, have a roster of international announcers, lots of beer (and beer-can pyramids) and hundreds of the world’s best derby players. At first, all four days quickly sold out before another block of tickets was released a week before the tournament.
The only Toronto-based skater on Canada’s team, Wilkins will join her far-flung teammates in facing off against 12 other squads from as far as Argentina and Australia.
An admitted “control freak,” she said she’s trying not to dwell on the fact that as of a week before the tournament, she hadn’t yet practised with everyone on Team Canada. In an amateur sport without funding for airfare, assembling a team of skaters from Vancouver to St. John’s for practice was no easy task. Chunks of the group have met up locally and in Montreal to practise a couple times, but it’s certainly no Olympic training regimen.
“If I go out (on the track) with my team I like to know exactly what everybody’s going to do,” said Wilkins, who plays locally on the Gore-Gore Rollergirls and as captain of Toronto all-star team CN Power. “I’ve made a conscious decision to be less serious about this particular event because there are so many unknowns ... It’s good practice for me to be less intense.”
Wilkins could barely roller skate when she started five seasons ago, but now works as a roller derby coach for less-experienced leagues throughout the province. She's one of the only Canadians to work full-time in the sport.
“Brim Stone (is) a very cerebral skater,” notes Toronto derby pundit Dave Miller, who writes an exhaustive blog called The Derby Nerd. “She rarely makes mistakes on the track and tends to play a fairly conservative game because she never panics ... I think that Brim is so successful because she ‘thinks’ the game as opposed to just experiencing it."
Her drive for excellence has been a strong motivator in her success, but can also express itself as frustration when things don’t go as she’d hoped. On and off the track Wilkins can seem like two different people; one focused and loud, the other quiet and often playful.
Her attitude toward sports in general says it all:
“I see sport as a showcase of really human qualities,” she said, as she waited at a coffee shop to meet up with her partner, who also plays derby. “It showcases our skills and the most extreme sense of what we are capable of, (and) failures that people have. Every time someone makes an awesome move, you can also see it as how someone else missed something.”
Her singular focus is not something that goes unnoticed by her teammates.
“Brim's drive to be the best means that you have to have the same drive,” says Megan “Mega Bouche” McPhail, a blocker who often plays on the same CN Power line as Wilkins. “The way she pushes herself makes everyone need to push themselves just as much, but she is always one step ahead.”
Jill Sole, who skates as Lady Gag-Ya on both of Wilkins’ Toronto teams, says you’d never know from first impressions that Brim Stone thinks about anything other than skating with nine other women in a counterclockwise direction.
With a longer tradition of derby than many countries, but less than the United States, Canada should land in the top three in the competition, as should the United Kingdom, predicts Miller. But don’t expect that to ease Wilkins’ mind. One simply need look to her jersey number (21:8, a reference to the Book of Revelation) to get a sense for how much mercy she’ll be showing her opponents.
“This is the second death.”
