"My son loves netball but when he turned 12, he wasn't allowed to play anymore."

I spent this past weekend at a roller derby tournament in regional Victoria. 

It was the first tournament my 14-year-old son had participated in, and I was struck by how diverse, how inclusive and how welcoming it was. My son joined a roller derby club in Melbourne about four years ago but lost much of 2020 and 2021 due to lockdowns and the closure of sporting facilities. 

After years of learning how to skate, how to fall, and how to play, he is now ready to compete in level two modified contact games. Modified contact implies slightly altered rules from full contact games for more experienced players, however, there is still plenty of pushing and shoving and using hips and bodies. Even modified contact games are as physical as AFL.

There are 13 skaters in my son’s team. They identify as female, male, and non-binary. Their preferred pronouns are as well-known as their derby names, the moniker that each skater invents for themselves when they start competing. 

At the tournament on the weekend, even the parents watching were careful not to mis-gender, and happily discussed skaters as 'they' until we knew differently. For parents of kids who have played in more conventional sports like netball and AFL, this is a big welcome shift in junior community sport.

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I wasn’t just struck by the inclusivity of the skaters, but also of the politeness, friendliness and respect given to coaches, referees, and other teams. At the end of each game, both teams skated in a circle while all the onlookers lined up around the outside and tapped their hands as they skated past to congratulate them on their efforts. It was a delight to watch.

My son started his sporting life by joining his local netball club. He’d spent years watching his older sister play in a team I’d coached since she was little. He was dragged along to all the games, the end-of-year barbecues and the fundraising events and eventually he started picking up a netball and throwing it to the other younger siblings in a similar position. 

When he joined a mixed team at the age of eight, he was one of four boys. The club had never had boys join before, and suddenly they had a team where almost half the players were male. My son and two of the other boys played until the season when they turned 13 when they were no longer allowed to compete in the mixed team that they had played in for five years due to the Netball Victoria gender regulation. 

Given that netball has always been considered a ‘girls’ sport, there were no mixed leagues that the boys could join. There were no pathways for them. They had spent five years learning and loving a sport that suddenly could not accommodate them in any way.

Around the time he stopped playing netball, he started taking roller derby more seriously. He liked the skills he was learning, skating fast and stopping dramatically by turning sharply to one side or flipping up onto toe stops. We began turning up to weekend training bouts where my son started to understand the sport he had chosen to play. The rules are complicated, and even after playing in a tournament we are both still learning them. 

My son’s team ranges in age from 12 to 16 years. They help each other, chat to each other, and teach each other. 

It is a small sport in Australia, much larger in the US. Derby began in America in the 1930s, with the same rules for male and female teams. Full-contact roller derby is unlike any sport I’ve ever witnessed, even at junior level. Players are aggressive with their bodies, using shoulders and hips and literally barrelling through a wall of skaters, all while skating at speed. It is a sport that proves that gender is not everything when it comes to strength, and as we witness professional sports around the world grapple with inclusion rights for transgender athletes, derby is a very unusual space. 

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In derby, every body type has different skills, so tall and strong is no more advantaged than small and nippy. There are different roles on the team for different body types too, so it is a very specific sport in that inclusion is almost inbuilt in its rules. Derby leagues in Australia have fought to make the sport inclusive and safe and skaters are allowed to participate based solely on the self-identification of their gender. 

And as a parent of a boy who lost one sport because of his gender, I love roller derby. I love it because it celebrates all bodies and all sizes and all genders, and for junior community sport, that is about the best message I can send my child. 

 Feature Image: Getty