Maynard, Scarlet Fever keep rolling

Sarah Jane Maynard knows what’s at stake as she and her Scarlet Fever teammates continue to carry the torch for roller derby in western Manitoba.

Maynard said the nine members of the core group continue to try growing the sport even though their numbers are down from around two dozen a decade ago.

“We refuse to quit because if we stop, it all stops,” Maynard said. “We’re just grabbing hold with our bare hands and we’re going to keep it going.”

Maynard, a local teacher who is also active in theatre, has been in the sport for more than a decade.

It all dates back to when she went with her theatre friends to the Band Jam For Cancer at The 40.

“I saw all these Amazons, these statuesque women covered in glitter and wearing matching shirts and I said ‘What are the shirts about?’” Maynard said. “They said ‘Roller derby, want to play?’ and I said ‘Ya.’ It started there.”

Still, a lot of people start a lot of things and don’t stay with them. With Maynard, the glue came from the same thing that drew her into the sport.

“The people,” Maynard said. “I’ve made such wonderful friends. I find it every rewarding other have a safe place to take out frustration and aggression and let some stress out, de-stress and just bang around.”

When she was a youngster, she tried a number of sports without ever meaningfully getting competitive in any of them. She eventually landed in Highland dancing and competed in that, and also did some running and hiking.

“This is really my first team sport,” Maynard said. “One of the things I love about it, not playing on those travel teams (when she was younger), I didn’t get to do those weekends in a van with a mom and hotel weekends and road trips. Now I get to do that as a grownup.”

On Saturday evening, she and her teammates were able to pay back FM Roller Derby for a beating they took in Fargo-Moorhead a month ago, earning a dominant 207-72 victory at CFB Shilo’s L-25 building on Saturday evening.

As a jammer, or scoring player, she tries to battle her way around the other team’s blockers, scoring a point for each one she gets by if she is the first to break out of the pack that starts each of the two-minute jams.

It’s a game that blends cardio and physicality in equal measures, and big hits and women tumbling over are inevitable. Maynard said it can take a physical toll.

“Some are harder than others,” Maynard said. “It often hurts afterwards but you don’t feel it until the next day because you’re full of adrenalin. It definitely gets the heart beating really fast. It gets the lungs expanding, lots of heavy breathing. “Sometimes I’m the most sore in the rib cage just from diaphragm working so hard.”

Each team can have up to 15 players, with each jam involving shifts of five players. That allows them to catch their breath on the bench before they return to the oval track.

“That can be a really action-packed two minutes,” Maynard said. “You need to be able to recover quickly, to be able to go sit for a minute and then go do it again.”

Maynard had an impactful bout on Saturday, something that pleased her teammate Dawn Dolloff, especially after they got shut down during their big loss in Fargo.

Dolloff said it was one of her best games in a while, but noted Maynard is always a big contributor to the small group.

“She is a lot of fun and she really, really cares about people,” Dolloff said. “I feel like that’s very genuine with her. There are a lot of time with friendships with people on teams, you play a sport with them but that doesn’t automatically mean you have that sense of caring about one another and how each other is doing outside of the sport. She’s very genuine in that caring for everybody.”

What makes her performance more remarkable is that Maynard doesn’t have unlimited time for training. She had a big part in the recent Mecca Productions staging of the Canadian play Come From Away, and had to miss some practices as a result. Her roller derby name, Jane Valjane, is a riff on Jean Valjean, the protagonist in Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel Les Misérables.

September is also a busy time for her in her day job as a teacher.

“She loves roller derby so much,” Dolloff said. “She’s always glad she found us and really is so happy to be part of the team. She has a great attitude and brings quite a lot of positive energy.

“She has a really demanding job as a teacher so sometimes she’s feeling pretty rundown from her job and she still manages to make it to practice and give us the little bit of energy she has left.”

The women wear roller-skates, helmets, mouthguards and knee, wrist and elbow protection. A lot of newcomers opt for the initial package — indelicately called the “fresh meat” package in the punk-rock ethos of the sport — that provides them with all the basics.

As Maynard stuck around in the sport, she began to upgrade her equipment one piece at a time.

“As I started to get faster and hit harder and fall harder, I needed a higher profile and better kneepad to protect me,” Maynard said. “When it came to the skates, I started with new boots and you pick the plate you want and experiment with different wheels. Usually it’s not all at once, but piece by piece.”

The challenge they face is growing the sport beyond the hardcore group. Brandon history is littered with once popular competitive sports that have gone away — broom ball, floor hockey and men’s softball are three examples — as their popularity waned.

Maynard said there’s no large-scale solution to the problem.

“It seems to be one person at a time,” Maynard said. “Often there is a lot of interest but it’s getting the follow through to get them in skates. Not having a place to go in town is a detractor. We’re out at Oak Lake now. We were able to train in the armoury and that was handy because that was right in town and we had three or four folks come in and learn.

“Some just wanted to learn how to skate and one has struck around and this was her third game and she got the bug.”

It’s not an easy sport, but Maynard has made time for it in her life anyway. While she’s one of small group of women keeping the sport alive, she said it’s given her an awful lot.

“It has definitely made me more confident,” Maynard said. “It has made me feel a little bit more bad ass, and just to trust my body to do something so physical, to go into a pack with all I’ve got and know my gear will help me and my friends will help me.

“I can really trust my body, trust my friends, and it’s going to be a great time.”

» pbergson@brandonsun.com