For the playoffs, Jordan Jurich-Weston stocked her fanny pack with a pocket-sized toolbox and a bottle of Ibuprofen. When not competing on the roller derby track as Eris Jordan, she’s the maestro behind the Bay Area Derby league’s live broadcasting channel. Her production crew can be spotted by their black shirts on which she screen printed the BADTv logo in gold.
“You can pee. Just take [your headset] with you,” Jurich-Weston instructed a crew member during one of the breaks in the action. After reporting the livestream was off to a strong start, she knocked her fist on the hardwood floor in Richmond Memorial Auditorium.
Underneath the arena’s grid of recessed lights, 12 of North America’s best roller derby teams competed last month to earn four spots in the 2026 Women’s Flat Track Derby Association Championships in Malmö, Sweden. For Jurich-Weston and other leaders of Bay Area Derby, it mattered less which team won. They had to organize and stage a three-day tournament that would showcase their increasingly popular sport, one built around an inclusive, competitive and free-spirited subculture.
Roller derby was a television staple in post-World War II America, with an estimated 15 million weekly viewers in the late 1960s, before attention died off due to factors that included overly scripted dramatics. The modern revival began in the early 2000s. Full-contact competitions — called bouts — are played on quad roller skates. There are two teams of five skaters, each with one “jammer” who can score points by lapping opponents called “blockers” who try to stop the jammer.
Today, the leagues are largely skater owned and operated. They are also known as welcoming homes to transgender, nonbinary and queer skaters. Bay Area Derby, almost always shortened to BAD, has been one of those homes and a hub for skaters in Northern California for over 20 years. For the first time in more than a decade, the league took on the responsibility of hosting the regional playoffs — a culmination of years of hard work to rebuild after COVID-19.
Skaters fought through the logistical challenges of practicing without a dedicated space until earlier this year, when they signed a long-term lease for a warehouse in an Oakland industrial complex. The league’s shutdown during the pandemic also meant that Eris Jordan, a “blocker,” was deprived of an outlet for her grief.
“It was pretty devastating to lose my dad [to cancer] and lose my outlet,” Jurich-Weston said.
Once social distancing mandates were relaxed, she and others stepped up to get BAD back on track.
Rubber wheels whooshed and whacked against the plastic track.
“One more!” A jammer yelled to her blockers as she skated full speed toward the wall of bodies awaiting her. “Give me one more!”
Black plastic folding chairs comprised both team benches; matching tables lined the far end of the room. Some skaters had their numbers Sharpied onto their biceps while others wore them on armbands. The oval track, formed by a mosaic of interlocking tiles, was marked with tape — periodically refreshed by volunteers wielding scissors.
Seated in the arena’s second level, near one of the green-lit headsets crowning the BADTv camera operators, Simrill Smith — whose pronouns are she and they — was decked out in all green. Flowy pants, a snake-skin top, and a bandana pulling back her brown hair with teal streaks completed the outfit. Only the purple windbreaker scrunched up on their lap broke up the monochrome.
Everyone from BAD calls Smith Creech or Creechie, shorthand for her derby name She Creature. The green represents the San Francisco Rolling Dead, the team she captains. Smith was recently moved up to the Supernovas Ultraviolets, a high-level coalition team that competed in the playoffs.
Though she didn’t make the playoff roster, Smith said they were honored to be on the team, even if it meant mixing green and purple.
She grew up playing sports and in college at Georgia Tech was enthralled by people in roller skates recruiting players. The competition and inclusive queer community they found in derby became vital to Smith. As soon as she knew she was moving to the Bay Area to work as a restoration design engineer, Smith reached out to BAD.
“A few weeks after I moved, I went to practice,” they said.
As a co-chair of the league’s marketing and public relations, Smith’s battlestation for the tournament was a handheld device. Her phone screen oscillated between the Notes app, BAD’s Instagram account and the league’s Slack channel.
Living in San Francisco but practicing in Oakland, Smith has made BART a second office. She uses the commute to keep up with derby administrative tasks, like planning social events or creating flyers on Canva. The work is worth it for Smith, who thinks of derby as her chosen family in the Bay Area.
After one of the playoff bouts, she ventured to the lobby to film social media content. While setting up for a post-game interview, one player was nervous about being on camera.
“I’m gonna make it weird,” the player said.
“You’re so fine,” Smith replied.
A woman with short, dark curls took in the chatter from her radio earpiece. The clear, coiled tube winding down to a black radio clip on her shirt swayed as she speed walked through the lobby.
“What is Umm’s job?” one BAD skater asked. “Everything,” another responded.
Alex Hanna, derby name Umm Kaboom, was one of the tournament directors. A longtime BAD member and leader, Hanna works as a sociologist and the director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, which does community-focused AI work. She co-authored “The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want” with renowned linguist Emily Bender. The duo hosts a podcast that digs into the fact and fiction of AI hype.
As new technologies push people into more isolated existences by offering alternatives to things like therapy and friendship, Hanna sees purpose in the friction it takes to create and maintain community. She found roller derby early in her transition while looking for places with queer people as a graduate student in Wisconsin. It also serves as her reprieve from sitting at a computer all day.
“It’s important to also be reminded I can do very cool things with my body, especially as a trans person,” she said.
As a former leader of BAD’s learn to skate program — part of the funnel that lets newbies safely integrate into the sport — Hanna has helped teach more than half the league how to skate.
To Hanna, building with people means sticking with them, working through the difficult parts, and acknowledging that people aren’t disposable.
“The thing that you’re going to build is going to be so much more beautiful,” she said.
Recently, the physical toll of the sport after 13 years and the mental toll of leadership has been weighing on her. As the league becomes increasingly stable, Hanna is thinking about taking a step back.
One of the skaters Hanna taught is Lexi Leong, who spent the tournament wrangling a 160-volunteer staff.
Sunlight from the lobby’s floor-to-ceiling windows reflected golden off her black hair as she craned her neck to watch a bout through a doorway into the auditorium.
Described by her teammates as a jammer extraordinaire, Leong couldn’t miss seeing Freight Train, an illustrious jammer from Los Angeles, in person for the first time. As she watched, both hands clasped a color-coded volunteer schedule for the tournament that broke down everything from filling water jugs in the locker rooms to selling merch. The full force of BAD was behind the many volunteer duties that made the event possible.
Leong brings the systematic, problem-solving based approach of her work as a software engineer to her role leading BAD’s human resources committee. Spreadsheets and process documentation have helped the league keep track of the essentials that used to fall through the cracks.
She works from home, which is convenient but lonely.
“I need to be around other people, and if they’re hitting me that’s just a bonus,” Leong said.
BAD Juniors, a youth league that welcomes all genders, also keeps Leong busy. When her 12-year-old son Marco wanted to play, she was happy to get involved and lend her experience as a coach. A fellow jammer, Leong has been told that Marco — derby name Marco Plow-Low — skates just like her.
Leong finds herself constantly talking strategy with Marco these days. They have the most fun when a double header has them playing games back-to-back.
“I see a lot of myself in him,” she said.
Someone stopped to gawk alongside Leong as Freight Train rocked a blocker to the floor. They shared a look of delight. Marco was upstairs, watching the bout as they spoke.
“I know,” Leong said. “Wow,” the spectator responded.
On the final day of the tournament, Hanna arrived late but in style.
Black velvet panels ran down the open front of her cardinal red gown, three horizontal panels on each sleeve. The octagonal black velvet cap, called a tam, and four-foot-long hood draping down her back denoted the Ph.D. in sociology she received from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016. A red keffiyeh hugged her shoulders.
People are walking around in sequined outfits and metallic lamé coats. Someone comments that Hanna leaned into the tournament’s theme of the day.
“It says sparkly, this is the most expensive thing I own,” she said.
After delivering the commencement speech for University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Sociology, Hanna rushed to the venue. She was stopped for the occasional hug or selfie as she jumped into getting the BADTv stream playing in the lobby. Even as the tournament was humming away smoothly, she couldn’t help herself from working.
In her commencement speech, she gave the graduates permission to be bad at something and plant seeds.
“As political philosopher Olufemi O. Taiwo says often, ‘I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win.’ But the only way we are going to get there is together,” Hanna told them.
As Denver Roller Derby Mile High Club was inching closer to its gold medal victory, BAD skaters were looking for things to do.
“I keep making loops, but everything is fine,” one skater said after pausing in the lobby. Nearby, Jurich-Weston shared a laugh with the venue’s security staff. The BADTv crew was managing production without her courtside, but Jurich-Weston still had her headset.
“I’m excited today is going so smooth,” she said, her eyes darting toward the competition floor. “I better knock on wood to make sure that I didn’t just jinx us.”
