Wheelsley Crush Her, left, watches closely during a Keweenaw Roller Derby bout earlier in the season, tracking sheet at the ready. (Kent Kraft/For the Gazette)

The simple phrase, “it takes a village,” is appropriate for many things, including sporting events. As a spectator, we file in to the bleachers, anticipating a great match to unfold before us, and most likely don’t contemplate what all went in to putting the match on for us.

At a professional sports level, players are there to play the game and are most often not involved in the minutiae of how the venue was procured, who got the referees to show up, who scheduled the other team to play, or who is keeping score of the match. For Keweenaw Roller Derby (KRD), a team that is a 501(c)(3) organization, the people who are doing most of those things are the players you see out on track competing.

Obviously, once the bout starts, they can’t continue making sure all is well as they have other things to concentrate on. They rely heavily on volunteers and non-skating members of their team to fill in all of those necessary positions to make a bout run smoothly.

Enter “Wheelsley Crush Her,” a skater who joined up with KRD in July 2023. While she was going through the new skater program, she also volunteered with the team as a non-skating official, or NSO. For five bouts, she’s been doing penalty and lineup tracking.

Those two jobs are, in many ways, just as they sound. For penalty tracking, she has to write down the number of the player and the foul they performed in the correct jam on her sheet. For lineup tracking, she has to write down the player numbers for a team and make sure to specify which player is the jammer and the pivot.

Beyond that, she also has to track which jam the player receives the penalty, when they start serving the penalty and when they leave the penalty box. If there is a star pass, meaning the jammer passes the star cover to the pivot, that has to be noted on the line up sheet.

The trackers are in the middle of the track, watching the skaters go ’round and ’round, watching for any potential star pass. Music is blaring, announcers are commenting on the action, the crowd is cheering, the players are shouting advice to one another, and upwards of eight different referees could shout out a penalty at any moment.

Suffice to say, things are noisy and complicated during the jams and the trackers have to keep an eye out for a multitude of things, making it a challenging job. Interestingly, this keeps the trackers hyper-focused on the smaller pieces of the bout which many fans may not notice.

However, the trackers are so focused on those parts, the larger picture of the bout, such as the score and who is winning, can often escape them until they look up at the scoreboard.

Wheelsley enjoys being in the middle of the action, quite literally, and feels like she is providing a very helpful service to the team. It is also a way she can participate with the team even when she hasn’t felt ready to take to the track and join the action just yet.

Some 10 years ago, she saw her first roller derby bout on her birthday when she lived in Washington, D.C., and thought the action looked like fun. Even though she hasn’t considered herself someone who would enjoy purposefully running into another person, something about the action on the track appealed to her.

About two years ago, when she moved to the Keweenaw, she was excited to learn there was a roller derby league here and went to the first bout of the 2023 season. Seeing all the players smiling, dancing, and generally looking like they were having a good time reminded her what had appealed to her back in the first bout she saw.

Between a love of skating (both on quads and roller blades) as she grew up and the hope of finding a new group of friends, she attended a gear try on and informational session, then started attending the new skater program. She loved being back on skates, but had a hard time gauging what her progress was like as far as roller derby action was concerned.

Still, this was something she’d never done before and was something she had fun doing, so she knew she’d stick with it. The creation of a derby identity grew in importance and, after some brainstorming between herself and her husband, she turned to her network of friends on Facebook to get feedback and even more ideas.

A fan of the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” television show, she enjoyed several of the pun infused names people were coming up with in that realm, particularly around the character Wesley Crusher. Through a friend’s suggestion (someone from the D.C. area, as it happens) and some work of her own, the name Wheelsley Crush Her came into being.

The choice of her skating number fits right in as 1701 is the number you see on the saucer of the starship USS Enterprise on the same show. For anyone out there thinking up their own derby name/number combination, Wheelsley points out that symbols and decimals aren’t allowed (she thought about using the name “French Slick” with the symbol for pi as her number at one point).

Her favorite derby memory so far was in August 2023 when she was presented with her certificate for completing the new skater program and was officially invited to join the league as a member. While she continued practicing with the squad and learning more every time, competing against the veterans on the team had her wondering if she’d make an impact on track in a bout.

The KRD squad is very much “challenge by choice” according to Wheelsley, and she’s never felt pressured to compete if she wasn’t ready. When she talked about going through the new skater program for a second time, they encouraged her to do so.

After taking to the track with many first-timers in 2024, the progress she’d made became much more apparent to Wheelsley. In fact, this second time through has bolstered her confidence to a point where she is planning on making her debut at the Aug. 31 bout.

For anyone who hasn’t been to a KRD bout before, Wheelsley encourages you to come out and give it a try, saying you’ve probably never seen anything like it before.

If there are people out there still thinking they would like to try roller derby but have reservations, she echoes many of her teammates in saying there are a multitude of ways to help the team at a variety of levels of commitment. You could be like her and dip your toe in the experience while also volunteering.

Her final words of wisdom are that no one should feel too old for derby. There are people in the league who are in their twenties as well as people who are twenty years or more into their professional careers outside of derby. Everyone is welcome and can find a place here.

You can cheer on Wheelsley Crush Her in her derby debut along with the rest of her KRD teammates 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 Wheelsley 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/.