Kent Kraft/For the Gazette Liz Boss, left, observes a jam closely as Keweenaw Roller Derby took on Mid-State Roller Derby earlier this season in Calumet.

When spectators file out of the Calumet Colosseum after a Keweenaw Roller Derby (KRD) bout, they frequently encounter volunteers who helped put the bout on, thanking those spectators for attending. In reply, two common sentiments come out from the spectators: they had a great time and they struggled to understand some of what they just saw.

As with any sport, there are a lot of rules defining the allowable action in roller derby. If you think back to the first time you attended a match for a sport you hadn’t seen before, chances are you would be lost for a good portion of the event.

For one first time KRD attendee in 2014, confusion was certainly present, but so was an intense interest in what she was seeing. Attending the bout was a whimsical decision after a friend invited her, but once she attended her first bout, she was hooked.

Describing herself as a superfan, Liz Boss attended the rest of the home bouts in 2014 and all of 2015. Cheering them on from the stands was great fun, but she really wanted to do more than that. The energy of the bout was transfixing. The strength of the mental fortitude for people who would willingly go out into the melee was impressive.

For this particular person, participating in the actual derby seemed like it was an impossibility. With a hypermobility issue, getting hit constantly in a sport like roller derby was out of the question. Still, the desire to do more lingered.

In 2016, she still attended bouts, but also stepped up her support of the sport by becoming a sponsor. She got to know many of the participants at this point as well and kept feeling the pull, the desire to be a part of it, the need to be integrated even further.

Finally, in 2017, she was convinced enough to attend a gear try-on. When she was up on skates, she loved the experience. This was something she wanted to do, but knew she couldn’t.

That’s when fate stepped in and someone else attending the try on mentioned they were interested not in the competition side of skating, but possibly in refereeing. That’s when the metaphorical light bulb ignited in her brain and she knew what her place could be within KRD.

An injury (unrelated to the sport, she wants to assure everyone) in 2018 meant she couldn’t be on skates to take on a referee position, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t still help out. She became a non-skating official (NSO) and participated in bouts that season mostly doing jam timing. That’s the person who has a stop watch and stands in front of the skaters who are lined up for a bout, shouts five seconds loudly, then blows a whistle to start the jam.

When she first started watching the sport, it took several bouts before she got a good feel for what was going on. Even though she couldn’t be on skates to ref in 2018, she did start taking a deep dive into the rules of women’s flat track roller derby.

As a referee since 2019, being a person in charge of enforcing the rules, she admits she is still learning the rules. There are many nuances and situational conditions for rule enforcement and, particularly given the fast pace of roller derby, these are really hard to wrap one’s head around.

One thing that has really helped is participating in practices with the squad. During practice, she learns more about what the team strategies are in a bout, knows more about what skaters are trying to do on the track and, most importantly, gets to see the action at a slower and more purposeful speed. This is invaluable to take back with her to bout conditions.

The governing body for KRD’s sport is the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association, and they set up the official rule book referees need to follow. These rules are constantly going through small changes and occasionally large upheavals, so staying on top of those is yet another layer of complexity in keeping the rules straight for a referee.

Just like those who are smashing into one another during a bout, referees get to choose a derby name. As is the case with many people, she struggled to come up with something she liked. At a practice session during the new skater program, someone behind her yelled out, “People should call you Liz Boss!”

Looking around to see who it was, she realized it was Thimbleberry Slam, a skater who happened to work with her boyfriend at the time. Chuckles from some of the other attendees heighted the alarm she was feeling at this point, wondering what in the world her boyfriend was saying to his colleagues.

Soon enough, she realized the name came about simply from wordplay with her own last name. Still, the instant concern that it dealt instead with her personality traits meant there was some truth to the connection as well. She did wryly admit she does indeed enjoy bossing people around.

Still, there was a timidity she was feeling to owning the name. Sure, there were connections and it was amusing, but she worried, particularly as a referee, that calling herself Boss would have unintended implications to the others on the crew that day.

In the end, with the realization she’d never be able to control what other people thought about her or her name, she embraced the name fully. Even though she only gets called that by the team and on during bouts, Liz Boss has become who she is both on the track and off.

Now that she had her name nailed down, she turned her attention to a number. Frequently, there is a connection between name and number, but there wasn’t an immediate connection between Liz Boss and a number.

Since Liz Boss is a play on her own name, she decided on a number that could do the same. This led her to 808, a holdover of a place she lived in for 10 years and loved: the area code for Hawai’i.

Interestingly, the journey for Liz Boss, who became a referee, started the same way as the journey of any member who is skating with the team as a player in the bouts. She went through the new skater program in 2017, after the try on epiphany, and, despite the different role, is a member of KRD.

This may make some readers scratch their heads in confusion, little red warning flags raising. Shouldn’t referees be impartial during a match? In answer to this question, Liz Boss said absolutely and, in short, they are.

Referees in any sport are only human and will have a natural tendency to favor one team over another or some players over others, but it is part of their job to shove all that aside, focus on the match at hand, and embrace impartiality. For Liz Boss, that means focusing on the action going on without looking at faces. She also mentioned that when you have so many things you’re looking out for because of the multitude of possible penalties, it’s hard to grasp who is who in the melee.

Speaking of the humanity of referees, she also points out the fact that referees make mistakes. There are checks and balances within the rules to help with this (official reviews and official timeouts to name a few), but much of this can be lost on the fans who are further removed from the action of the track.

Liz Boss mentioned she appreciates the crowds at KRD events because they’ve been supportive and not even remotely abusive to the referees. In a sport with such easy access to players and referees, she is very happy with this.

All of the skaters and referees of KRD are ambassadors of their sport, both on track and off. Few of them are as much of a cheerleader for the sport as Liz Boss though. She makes it her mission to spread the word and joy of roller derby as far and wide as she is able to, telling people about it through her work and slipping it in to even the most casual of conversations at every chance.

Her main selling point? Derby has a place for everyone! You can be a spectator and superfan. You can be a sponsor. You can volunteer and help put the bout on, making it safe and fun for the spectators. You can help as an NSO. You can be on skates and pound into other people. You can be on skates and referee with what she says is the best seat in the house, right in the middle of all the action.

You can watch Boss ref and cheer on KRD at the last home bout against the Kingsford Krush on Aug. 31 at 6 p.m. in the Calumet Colosseum, with doors opening at 5 p.m. If you want to know more about supporting Boss and the team, including learning how you can be a part of the action by volunteering, you can visit the KRD website at https://keweenawrollerderby.com/.