There's been a lot of talk about The FM Derby Girls selling out every one of its roller derby matches during this team's inaugural season.
Cool, but boring. Time for a new conversation. A more relevant conversation.
Because while it's easy to quantify the success of this fledgling alternative sports team in the math of attendance, the impact of the FM Derby Girls is so much more than a bottom line.
The real success of these wild and fearless women is that they've managed to build civic pride in people who are usually too apathetic and cool to care about, well, anything.
You'll see it Saturday night at the Fargo Civic Center when these women pack the house with hipsters, punkers, outcasts and packs of other people who don't fall into the narrow category of "normal" Fargoans.
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And you'll find these social outsiders cheering for women on roller skates as loud and vibrantly as the Bison football fanatics or the political groupies who scream at every rally in the region.
My point isn't to cast these derby fans as weirdos (I'm one of you). But in a city where it seems like the same 14 people represent us for everything from taxing issues to social planning, it's so refreshing to find different, sincere faces representing and fighting for the city.
Suddenly, it's cool to cheer for Fargo-Moorhead. And it's all because some feisty females decided to skate in an imperfect oval and elbow each other like they were escorts at a prison break.
Selling out arenas is easy to talk about. But giving people something to be proud of is a real victory.
If you go
- What: FM Derby Girls vs. Sioux Falls Killa Beez
- When: 7 p.m. Saturday
- Where: Fargo Civic Center
Tickets: Seats for the matchup are sold out. Readers can reach Forum Features Editor Robert Morast at (701) 241-5518 or rmorast@forumcomm.com
