Texas Rollergirls
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| Metro area | Austin, Texas |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Founded | 2003 |
| Teams |
Texecutioners (A team) Firing Squad (B team) Hell Marys Honky Tonk Heartbreakers Hotrod Honeys Hustlers |
| Track type(s) | Flat |
| Venue | The Blood Shed |
| Affiliations | WFTDA |
| Org. type | LLC |
| Website | http://www.texasrollergirls.org/ |
Texas Rollergirls is a women's flat track roller derby league based in Austin, Texas. Founded in early 2003 and widely credited as the league that started the modern roller derby movement, the Texas Rollergirls were the first flat track league in the nation to play a version of roller derby using new standardized rules and a track design based on the dimensions of the old banked tracks. As flat track derby caught on in other American cities, the Texas Rollergirls' rulebook and track design eventually evolved into the specifications that were adopted and ratified upon formation of the Women's Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA) in 2005, of which Texas is a founding member.
The league consists of four home teams that play within the league and sometimes compete with member teams from other WFTDA leagues. The Texas Rollergirls all-star travel team, the Texecutioners, represents the league in WFTDA competitions and tournaments with other leagues. The Texas Rollergirls were the first winners of the WFTDA Championships in 2006.
The founding skaters of the Texas Rollergirls were originally affiliated with an Austin, Texas roller derby organization known as Bad Girl Good Woman Productions (BGGW), which formed after an aborted attempt by Daniel Eduardo "Devil Dan" Policarpo, an Austin-based musician, to start a modern roller derby-themed enterprise. BGGW formed as the first all-female roller derby organization. The first public exhibition was held at Playland Skate Center in Austin on June 23, 2002, in front of 350 fans, with a follow-up event held in August before double the number of people. The final event of 2002 sold out at 1200 tickets, and hundreds of people had to be turned away. A March 2003 doubleheader at the Austin Music Hall during South by Southwest featured the band Nashville Pussy for entertainment. By April, approximately 80% of the skaters left BGGW, taking three of the extant four teams with them, to form Texas Rollergirls Rock-n-Rollerderby, while the remaining skaters recruited new members to found the TXRD Lonestar Rollergirls. The nascent Texas Rollergirls announced their first bout in April 2013 at Playland Skate Center, and in July of that year surpassed attendance levels previously under the BGGW name. The Texas Rollergirls continued to develop and play a flat track game that spread to other cities and became the basis of the game now fostered by WFTDA, while the Lonestar Rollergirls developed their own version of a roller derby game played on a banked track. The reasons and events leading up to the departure of the founding members of Texas Rollergirls are documented in the 2007 film Hell on Wheels.
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