Hot Take: Interview with Executive Director of Women's Flat Track Derby Association, Erica Vanstone

On July 22, 2020, Jessica interviewed Erica Vanstone, the Executive Director of the Women's Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA). They talk about the association's response to COVID, the work they're doing towards dismantling racism, and the overlap of the WFTDA's LA league, Angel City, with the name of the newly-announced NWSL team in LA, Angel City FC.

Find the WFTDA here: wftda.com/

Music during the episode: "For We Shall Know Speed" by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)

Transcript

Jessica: Hello flamethrowers, Jessica here. On Wednesday, July 22nd, a little over two weeks ago, I spoke with Erica Vanstone, the executive director of the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association – that means roller derby.

Erica: I’m Erica Vanstone, I am the executive director of the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association. We are based in Austin, Texas, but we represent the sport of roller derby and that means we have more than 450 member organizations in 23 countries, so we are also a global organization.

I got into roller derby in 2007. I live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; a good friend of mine was getting involved in the league here with Philly roller derby early on in 2006. I went to see a game and I thought it was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen in my life. My first foray into WFTDA roller derby was actually as an announcer. I would say 3 weeks after my first gig I found out that I was pregnant with my son. I basically worked on announcing for a few years and then decided it was time for me to put on some skates and do some officiating, and then a few years later after that I finally was ready to become a skater. It took me a while to get there.

Jessica: So do you have a name?

Erica: I do…[laughing]

Jessica: What is your roller derby name?

Erica: My roller derby name is Double H. This season I was actually really excited to skate under my government name, under Erica Vanstone, because I felt like it was finally time for me to do that.

Jessica: Can you just tell us a little bit more about the WFTDA…Do you guys say all five letters every time?

Erica: We do. And thank you for asking, because a lot of people just say “woof-teh-dah” which sounds kind of funny. Yeah, the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association, we’re a 501c3 non profit based in Austin, Texas, which is really where flat track started. Of course Texas Rollergirls is still going strong in Austin, Texas today, and that was really sort of the mother league of the WFTDA, and now we have more than 450 clubs or leagues, we call them, around the world. We represent over 40,000 athletes and officials in over 23 countries. We typically say “over 23 countries” because some people live in one country and skate in another.

Jessica: That’s a lot of people under your umbrella.

Erica: It is a lot.

Jessica: We’re obviously in this terrible moment of a health pandemic and all the other things associated with it, and there was a recent WIRED article about your league’s return to play guidelines, and it said, “Experts in infection control say it’s the best of its kind.” So, can you briefly tell us what your return to play guidelines look like?

Erica: Yeah. We’re a member association, we’re the governing body, and so we function a lot like what you might consider a professional sports league and a players association and an officiating association all in one organization. The thing that sets our plan apart from everybody else’s is the baseline assumption of the plan which is: we don’t want people to contract COVID-19. That sounds completely elementary to say out loud but we're in this strange new world where not wanting people to contract COVID is somehow radical thinking. So we wanted to create something, because we have leagues represented in over 23 countries, we wanted to make sure that we had taken some time to kind of assess the climate, the plan, the data that was happening in all of these countries. So when COVID first came to the United States we watched and then we collected data from around the world, and what our data was telling us was really very scary and we knew right away that our plan had to focus on helping people stay alive more than anything else. Because we are an amateur sport we are not necessarily reliant on the same professional relationships that I think, say, the NFL would have to focus on – they have players who are making millions of dollars, they have billions of dollars that they’re anticipating in sponsorship, broadcast rights, fan revenue.

We still feel those financial impacts on a similar scale, but our value system is completely different. So that ironically freed us up to be able to say we would like leagues’ member associations to, number one, determine for themselves if they want to return or if it’s too dangerous for them to return, that’s okay too. Then if they did want to attempt to return, we wanted to make it clear that nobody should be rushing. We eliminated the competitive pathway, we cancelled our playoffs and championships and paused our ranking, and so if members did wanna get back on skates it was purely because conditions were right to do so. And people love playing roller derby, so we wanted to make sure that that kind of stayed at the core of the plan.

Jessica: How did you come up with these guidelines?

Erica: After looking at information from around the world, we realized as we saw COVID unfold in the United States that there was not gonna be a firm direction from the US government for sports or many other entities. We knew that each state and each city were really trying to process and relay this information individually. One of the challenges that we’re seeing with COIVD now was one of our early predictions which is this isn’t going to peak and then just go away, especially the way the US government is managing the conversation now amongst all of the states and city. So we knew that we had to create something that would allow for leagues to step on and then step back off if they had to. In early April we put out word to the community that we were looking for frontline workers, epidemiologists, medical professionals who would be willing to help us talk some of these ideas over with us. We got a handful of really amazing individuals step forward who volunteered to work with us on putting a plan together.

Jessica: What’s been the reaction to all of this?

Erica: What's interesting is that the reaction from both the roller derby community and other communities has been that we are basically putting information into what is now an information vacuum. The federal government in the United States isn’t putting guidelines forward – even if they’re wrong, you know? – they’re not putting a lot of information out there. I think that a lot of sports return plans have to do with testing and the bubbles, isolating players, and our plan is completely different to that. We are putting forward kind of a formula that really steps forward in a way that I don't think a lot of other sports have, because it is a bit of a risk. We don’t know if we’re right because we haven't been through this pandemic, we don’t have the benefit of knowing fully everything we could about COVID-19. So our epidemiologists worked with us on a formula that was essentially 50 in 100,000 over 14 days. That was primarily for urban populations or people who are inc cities or larger areas where lots and lots of people live.

The 50 in 100,000 metric is what we’re having folks use, and then below that we give folks a table for saying, you know, you have under 10,000 people in your league’s locality, we want you having no COVID. If you have, you know, roughly 10,000, maybe 5 per 10,000 over 14 days is ideal. Our goal was to put this out there into the universe and then to track the data to see if we were right, to see if people were reporting cases, to see if these metrics were useful and helpful. So far we’re about a month and a half into the plan and most of what we’re seeing tells us that it does seem like we came to a reasonable conclusion.

Jessica: That's so fascinating, that idea of the vacuum, because I think that’s so true. I feel like people are just desperate at this point.

Erica: And the thing to save us is math and science! That’s what's so radical right now is anytime I talk to somebody who’s like, “Well, I just don't know about the virus,” my response is, yes, you do! Science is putting forward some reasonable baseline expectations for what you should be doing. Epidemiologists around the country including here in Pennsylvania, I think, Pennsylvania has put forward a bunch of different…And actually, this was one of the places that we drew inspiration for the formula, but it’s math, it’s science that's helping us out here.

Jessica: I do wanna go back to something you mentioned around money. How are your teams and the league in general managing the financial impact of the pandemic?

Erica: Probably about halfway through the first leg of the pandemic we put out a survey to our member organizations and kind of asked, what does the financial impact look like for you? In April we cancelled our championships event which was supposed to happen in Austin in November, and our playoffs and cups events. We really just halted our competitive pathway, but we know that, but we know that each league has its own events, its own tournaments; some of the produce tournaments, some of them just host home team games in their local area. We knew that having to shut that down was gonna have a financial impact to those communities because, in many cases, the ecosystem of the amateur sport has to do with covering costs and not necessarily driving tons of revenue in the way that the for profit model is designed. If you don’t have events, yes, you don’t have costs going out, but you also don’t have revenue coming in.

Most of these entities are membership organizations themselves, and a lot of them especially in the United States are 501c3 non profits. A lot of us have had to shift our revenue model thinking on these conversations a lot because if leagues are not able to bring in revenue, clubs can’t bring in revenue; a lot of them might not be able to pay their membership association which is us, the WFTDA, and then if the WFTDA doesn’t have events taking place throughout the world then we’re ultimately not bringing in that revenue. In three months we saw a third of our revenue for the year just wiped away, and of course the longer the pandemic persists the worse that gets.

Jessica: I mean, women’s sports in general operate in a lack of resources, lack of investment. All those things are already sort of plaguing women’s sports. Are you worried about that being worse on the other side? Are you guys preparing for that?

Erica: Yes, and no. The WFTDA, roller derby, and the community that we serve is used to doing  everything we can on our own. We were born and created out of a DIY model and I think a lot of the work we’re doing in the next several years has to do with re-envisioning that to make sure that it is more equitable to the communities that we serve.

Jessica: Women’s sports are built for this moment because they always operate in this sort of survival mode on some level, even the biggest leagues for women. It is interesting to see what this could mean on the other side.

Erica: Certainly. We have built a whole lot without outside support, and that’s a good thing and a bad thing, you know? We obviously wanna make sure that we’re engaging new fans, engaging with partners. The mainstream sports environment is really still very hostile to women. We will survive, WFTDA roller derby will survive, and on the other side of the pandemic I hope what we find is a sports community that is a bit more humble and a bit more open to new ideas, open to different ways of doing things, and open to sharing the space a lot more than it does currently.

Jessica: You’ve talked a lot about roller derby as community, as part of the communities in which they operate. Obviously COVID is not the only thing happening right now, which is a huge understatement on my part, but I did wanna ask about the fight for racial justice that’s going on right now. Roller derby is a majority white sport, correct?

Erica: Roller derby, like a lot of systems in the United States, was really built out of a system that is steeped in white privilege and built out of white privilege. So I think for those reasons we’ve maintained these racial silos in this sport, not by design but certainly that’s had an impact on the way this has developed. When most folks think of roller derby they sort of think of this white punk-rock cis woman aesthetic, and we came to realize this summer our community brought us to the table in the last few weeks to discuss why that was harmful. I’m so grateful that that happened because I absolutely agree.

Jessica: What are the efforts at this point, in roller derby and the WFTDA community, to hold itself accountable – right now, but also moving forward from this particular moment? What approaches are you all taking to foster anti-racism in roller derby?

Erica: We have a pretty ambitious plan to tackle it. Coming out of COVID-19 we realized that we have an approach to solving problems that could be really beneficial across a number of different types of issues that we’re facing. So we’ve taken the last few weeks to sit down with community members. As the executive director I’ve hosted open office hours to sit and talk to members of the community, skaters, officials who wanna come forward to tell me about their experiences. We’ve conducted open forums with he community, we have worked with diversity and inclusion specialists to make sure that staff and board are on the same baseline expectation for what anti-racism should look like in the WFTDA, and so it has maybe taken us a little bit longer than some other organizations to kind of collect ourselves, but out of the last couple of weeks I think what we’ve come up with is a pretty powerful plan for completely re-envisioning the way the WFTDA is designed.

We have created an anti-racism team project, we call it ‘the art project,’ and what we’re doing is we’re going out and we’re saying, listen, I as an an executive director of the WFTDA am a cis white human – that means I’m not necessarily gonna make the best decisions around what needs to happen strategically or at the ground level to be in an anti-racist organization because my perspectives are borne of the systems that is beneficial to white humans. We are looking for a number of community members of color to work with us to help us design something better, and we’re really thinking about this in an idealized design way, so, not looking at a system that might be built out of some racist concepts or colonizing concepts, but to completely envision something new. Like, how should a membership association look so that it can adequately serve all of its members? We’ve gotten really great feedback from the community around the tactical things that people have pointed out and discussed. For example, folks wanna see more engagement around our code of conduct and how can we shore up our code of conduct so that it’s clear that when you're a WFTDA member racism is not tolerated.

So it’s from the policy level, but then it could really reach all the way out to other areas including our membership requirements – do they perpetuate gatekeeping? Is our governance model perpetuating gatekeeping? What are the skills requirements that we’re asking folks to attend to, or our competitive pathways? Then of course we are engaging around officiating practices and how penalties are assessed. So, we have the next six months kind of sketched out as a prioritization time frame for ‘the art project’ and we’re gonna work with the community to re-envision some of these areas that we’re gonna work on over the next six years to dismantle racism within the WFTDA.

Jessica: Yesterday I was seeing a lot of tweeting about roller derby because there’s a new team for the NWSL in LA, and they’re calling themselves Angel City right now, and you all already have a team called Angel City in LA, it’s a WFTDA team. The team, at least through social media, seemed upset – this is going to crowd them out, this team with all these famous people associated with it marches into LA. What do you hope happens with this overlap that appears to exist at this point?

Erica: I’m saddened by the way that things played out with Angel City Football Club because I think that it is an opportunity for solidarity in women’s sports. I think a lot of our WFTDA roller derby community is very excited about and participatory in women’s sports in general, but absolutely women’s soccer, and I think that the way in which mainstream and professional sports operate around other women's sports, around amateur sports, around roller derby in particular in this instance, it’s kind of a signal to me that even at the major league soccer level for women they’re still operating potentially on a system of appropriation as opposed to sort of widening their perspectives to how women’s sports can act as community-building.

I think that that’s the biggest disappointment to me, is this could’ve been an opportunity for them to reach out to Angel City, our roller derby league in Los Angeles, to talk about how it is that there could be a partnership or collaboration – and I’m still hopeful that there is and can be, and I’m actually really excited about doing that. But I also think that because it happened, that tells me that there’s a default system at play. It’s entirely possible there was a conversation about it and someone in the room said, “Oh, it’s just roller derby, you don’t have to worry about that.” I think that that’s kind of what breaks everyone’s hearts, is the idea that we would have been dismissed at some level as not worthy of conversation or consideration.

Jessica: Yeah, because it does feel like there are two options: they either totally overlooked you, which is its own problem, or they dismissed your importance within the community, and either one of those sucks and says a lot about how this works.

Erica: And I would expect that they know exactly how that feels.

Jessica: Thank you so much for all of your time, I really appreciate it. This has been wonderful. How can our listeners follow and support the sport now and once it does return?

Erica: We are excited to say that some of our members are actually coming back, slowly. One of the things we’ve done is create a map, so if you go to wftda.com and you look under our COVID resources we do have a COVID readiness map and all of our leagues have been putting in what level they’re at. So you can go check to see if your local league is starting to get up and running again, but wftda.com is our website and we are on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. I think we might just be getting onto TikTok.

Jessica: Thank you so much, Erica, for being on Burn It All Down. 

Erica: Thank you for having me.