Filing Your New League Paperwork

Back in December, I posted a helpful guide to starting your own roller derby league. While that article does contain many pieces of useful information on initializing and building up the real-world side of roller derby (attracting new skaters, raising funds, finding practice space, etc.), I have subsequently gone through the process of starting a junior roller derby and I now see that there is a gaping hole in that post. Nothing ever gets done anywhere without the government sticking its nose in the middle of your business, which is annoying unless you do like me and visualize that sentence from the perspective of a proctologist. So here's a bit of helpful info from my wife Slugs Bunny on what you'll need to do to appease the paperwork gods and get your league rolling.

(Important note: This is written on the assumption that you are in the United States. If you gone through this process in another country, please send me the pertinent information for that country and I will gladly add it to this article with a shoutout!)

1) Get an EIN number from the IRS. You can do this on-line. It's free, and you get it immediately.

2) File for non-profit corporation status with your state. In TN, this was something I could do on-line. We spent $100 for this. You need the EIN from step 1.

3) Fill out form 1023 with the IRS for your exemption letter. It will cost $400 for the usage/filing fee. You will need the Non-profit status letter and the EIN from above, along with by-laws, articles of incorporation, etc. As soon as I have mine finalized, I'm happy to share these with you so you don't have to start from scratch. (Editor's Note: See below for documents.)

4) After all is said and done, you then need to pay for USARS. I believe it's $400 to cover your practice location for one year. In addition, the girls will also need to pay $40 a year and get individual USARS as well. (Editor's Note: We have since discovered it can be as little as $80 if you will not be having a bout in a given calender year, great for brand new startup leagues!)

ALSO: To open a bank account, the bank has to have the exemption letter. So, we can't open an account until the exemption letter from 1023 comes back. :-P

And to save you 34 hours of composing the needed paperwork from scratch, here are the documents that we submitted to start up our junior league (which are based on documents shared with us by the Nashville Rollergirls.  Thanks NRG! *hug*).  They are posted as web pages so you'll need to copy the text, paste into a new document and then edit the names and locations and customize the terms for your localized purposes.  Failure to edit properly may accidentally give me ownership of your league, which I will then rule with the iron fist of a cranky despotic tyrant, so proofread like crazy before submitting!

• Conflict of Interest Policy:  http://docs.google.com/View?id=dhk9drd9_67cgbrckhj
• Articles of Organization:   http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcbmghz6_34cg4g4mfq
• League Bylaws:  http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcbmghz6_35hgmc3rgm

Pimp My Feet

Everyone who loves roller derby agrees that there is one thing about the game that is more important than anything else. No, not developing your team skills or getting in peak physical condition, don't be silly! The most important thing is looking good in front of a crowd of people and the one area of your derby appearance that is most likely to be ignored is the most fundamental one: your skates. An astute Derby Helper reader has realized this and submitted the following question:

Hi,

I've just bought my first ever brand spanking new pair of skates. I put some tartan laces in that I had knocking around the house, but I really want to make them awesomely awesome & not just black. Preferably with skulls.

What methods are there for customizing your skates? Can you just paint on to them & if so what kind of paints should I use? I need ideas!

Thanks,

Martha

Well Martha, there are two different ways to go about taking the track with mackdaddy feet. The first way is to address the issue at the time you make your skate purchase. Why would you want to buy some generic pair of black leather skates that you have to modify when you could show up to the track in some of these beauties?

 Good news, these are zero emissions vehicles!  (Except on chili night.)

If only there was a country somewhere that could use these...

Why yes, I play for the Texas Rollergirls, why do you ask?

FMS's

FMHS's

But in your case Martha, since you've already spent your skate money, it's too late to save yourself all the pesky manual labor required to look pimptastic on the track.  So here are a few cutomization options you can look into.

Paint
You can buy acrylic paint for leather/vinyl and go to work painting up your skates.  A clear coating is applied over the top to protect the paint from wear and tear and trust me, you'll want protection from wear and tear.  The pro to this is that you work up any theme your brain can concoct.  The con to this is that you are at the mercy of your own creativity and artistic skills.  If your brain and hands are a swirling dervish of expression, you'll end up with the skate version of this...

...but if your favorite band is Nickelback and you think Dane Cook is hilarious, you might end up with something that looks more like this:

Pyrography
If your skate boots are leather and you have a soldering iron, you can scuff off the existing paint and burn creative patterns and images onto the leather:

If instead you have vinyl skate boots and a soldering iron, you can quickly and efficiently reduce your skates to a smoldering pile of ashes...

...so yeah, be kinda careful what you're scorching at 500 degrees. 


It appears that my ideas are getting dangerous pretty quickly so I'll stop here and throw this out to the roller derby community  What do you do to spice up your boring old Reidell's?  Email us your tips on snappy new ways to jazz up your skates (include a picture if you so choose) and I'll add them at the end of this post with your name so you get full credit for the awesome or full blame for the damage.

Sometimes People are Awesome

Photo by Michael W. Bunch
Click to see the whole gallery at NashvillePix

With roller derby growing so quickly around the world and with so many people in so many places interested in reading about it, I have consciously avoided referring to my city or giving disproportionate attention to my hometown league in order to present as impartial and all-inclusive of a site as possible.  That is how I will continue to present my content in the future but just this one time, I'm going to break form and give you a peek into the inside of the natural disaster that has hit my city, not to moan about God's wrath and beg for pity, but rather because the actions of the people of this city are nothing short of amazing and they need to be commended in any and every way possible.

The flood that hit Nashville, Tennessee and the surrounding region up into Kentucky was what actuaries call a 1000 year flood.  People who weren't even in the 500 year flood plain and literally not allowed to buy flood insurance had their homes and businesses decimated.  With insurance covering absolutely nothing, they have lost everything they owned.  Yet national media has actually given less attention to this event than even some foreign media.  I saw more about this disaster on UK websites than I saw from major US news sites.  On one hand, being ignored seems like a slap in the face, but on the other hand, the reason why I think we're mostly being ignore is nothing short of fantastic.

The news outlets love images of sorrow and human suffering.  The people of Nashville have denied them these images by mobilizing with incredible swiftness and a level of organization that I did not think was possible.  When one of our two water treatment plants was flooded and the other was being threatened, people showed up by the hundreds in no time to sandbag the remaining plant.   The sandbagging saved it by less than a foot, saving our water supply and preventing a whole order of magnitude worse of a disaster. Thousands signed up for volunteer organizations which swiftly and efficiently distributed volunteer help and donated supplies where they were needed most.  I showed up at one such temporary volunteer center being run by Hands On Nashville in a garden center.  Within minutes of arriving I was already headed to a flood afflicted area with a colored volunteer t-shirt that helped the police distinguish helpers from potential looters.  I pulled into a neighborhood to find that every house had multiple volunteers already helping to remove destroyed furniture and electronics, strip fouled carpet and padding, save and protect items that had escaped flood waters and arrange for alternate lodging.  I worked alongside one member of the Nashville Rollergirls and watched her do heavy lifting of waterlogged furniture until she was exhausted, all the while knowing she was going to a physically taxing practice that evening.  Local businesses are donating supplies, offering empty lots to store flood-damaged cars, giving free food or copies or laundry service or whatever it is that they can do for flood-affected families and even competitive flooded businesses.  The most amazing moment so far for me has been standing in the stripped bare, sewage-stinking shell of a house of a woman I had never met, watching her as she stood in the gloppy mud of her front lawn next to a giant pile of all of her destroyed possessions and she was... laughing?  Yes, laughing and joking around with her neighbor across the street who had also had everything he owned destroyed.  There aren't rivers of tears, scenes of looting, angry abandoned people screaming about the incompetence of FEMA or anything that normally makes headline news night after night.  There is simply a wonderful city of people who are treating strangers like family and taking care of their own.

(If you'd like to help flood victims by volunteering or donating, click here or here.)