.Best Retro Sports League

B.A.D. Girls (aka Bay Area Derby Girls)

In the 1950s, kids saw roller derby in major venues. Teens in the 1960s and early 1970s spent many a Saturday glued to television sets watching the brazen, ill-tempered jammers, blockers, pivots, and the rest of the pack whiz around banked roller-skating tracks using a full bag of dirty tricks such as punches and body blocks to thwart their equally evil opponents. An all-women’s version of the theatrical thriller hit Bay Area rinks in 2004 when a pack of roller-derby loving gals launched B.A.D. Girls. Today, their league is three teams and roughly sixty skaters strong. Competitors sport fast-wheeled dexterity, guts, and glory for the Oakland Outlaws, the Richmond Wrecking Bells, and the San Francisco ShEvil Dead. These amateurs — with names like Brick Shields, Lemmy Chokeya, Annie Agony, Minnie Peril, CutThroat Cathy, and Nancy Drew-Blood — practice full-contact, full-tilt, all-female, flat-track roller derby as members of the national Women’s Flat Track Derby Association, thereby suffering all the associated wounds that come with the territory. You go, girls.

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