It's Tuesday night at the Gotham Girls' practice space in Bushwick, and the trademark attributes of the championship women's roller-derby team are on full display: the spirited camaraderie, the marriage of controlled aggression and graceful athleticism, the playfully aggro monikers like Harm's Way and Crow Magnum.
"Tank! Filthy! Maulin'!" is the roll call as the coach directs players to line up for a speed drill.
What's not in evidence are any actual Gotham Girls — or, for the most part, any women at all. This is the New York Shock Exchange, the city's first and only men's roller-derby outfit.
NY Post Brian Zak
Founded in 2006, the New York Shock Exchange, seen here at practice in Bushwick, has bashed and crashed its way to the top of the Men's Roller Derby Association.
If you didn't realize men played roller derby — a frenetic, bruising game skated on a circular track — you're in good company. Although women's teams such as the Gotham Girls, which is 9-years-old, have drawn buzz and enthusiastic fan bases over the past decade, the men's teams that have grown up in their shadow remain more obscure.
"It's the fringe of a fringe sport," says Peter Eide, a k a Ladies' Knight, 41, who's skated with the Shock Exchange for three years. That's starting to change, though, he says: "People are slowly understanding that we exist and that men's derby is a real sport."
And the number of men strapping on skates is booming. When the Shock Exchange played its first match in 2007, it was one of only three teams in existence. Today the Men's Roller Derby Association counts 31 member teams (typically called leagues, as they comprise various sub-teams) in the US, from Baltimore's Harm City Homicide to the Green Bay Smackers. Teams have also sprung up in Europe, Australia, Canada and Mexico.
"There's been this huge, expansive growth," says Shock Exchange captain Jonathan Rockey, 30. "What started as a few guys getting together and starting teams is becoming a worldwide phenomenon."
Nobody has done more to make that happen than Rockey, a lanky middle-school science teacher with a cheerful intensity, who started the Shock Exchange back in 2006, while working as a coach and referee for the Gotham Girls. A Chicago-area native who, as a teen, had competed in the obscure sport of artistic roller skating, Rockey was excited to see women's derby emerge and offered his services to the team. When he learned there was a men's team in Massachusetts and saw a video of them scrimmaging, "It was go time," he says.
He spread the word through women's-derby channels, recruited online and tapped friends. And five months later, the New York Shock Exchange played the first men's roller-derby match in modern history, defeating the Pioneer Valley (Mass.) Dirty Dozen 109-51.
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