Monday, July 25, 2011

Derby Name Etiquette

On the subject of derby name etiquette, the following question was sent to your friendly neighborhood Derby Helper. With the explosion of new roller derby leagues around the world, I though others might benefit from the exchange so here you go:

HELP PLEASE........... Question: I am part of a new league and we have just broke into teams. We have thought of all kinds of great ideas for names, colors, and themes.... But, the names we like the BEST are already skater names in singular or different spellings. Can we use these or is it considered Taboo? We are using the Two Evil's registry to check names.

I think the key is whether or not there could be confusion generated by the name. If two skater names are too close to each other, you could conceivably mistake one skater for another. But if a skater name and a team name are equally similar, there is far less of a chance of confusion. I doubt anyone would read your posters and excitedly drive to your bout expecting to see their favorite player singlehandedly playing another whole team. (Though I would plunk down money RIGHT NOW to see any skater who could pull that off!) This is ultimately a judgement call you have to make but if the team name isn't completely identical to the skater name, and especially if this is for intraleague team names that will never play against other leagues anyway, I think you're relatively unlikely to receive any flack about the similarity. If TwoEvils rejects it, do what more and more skaters and teams around the world are doing and just ignore them. (Edit: That's not a rebuke against the efforts of the TwoEvils folks, just a growing acceptance of the reality that as the number of leagues worldwide climbs toward four digits and the number of registered skater names soars toward the mid five digits, there just isn't any point to not using a name in Ireland because someone in New Zealand is using it.)

So there's my opinion on the subject. Feel free to poop all over said opinion down below in the comments.



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Tuesday, July 19, 2011

That ref was LAME!


This is weird because usually they're just blind.


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