Knees bent, her nerves ignite. Flipping one pigtail over her right shoulder, she can feel her stomach turn. No matter how many times Danine Dibble has placed one skate-clad foot in front of the other, she still gets nervous before a jam. So she waits, knowing well that the initial jitters will disintegrate as soon as she hears her cue.

TWEET! The first game whistle blows, cutting through all other noise in the arena, and Danine waits still. At this level with her body bent, ready and shaped like a lightning bolt, she can see a convoluted mass of roller skates darting away from her. She remains at the starting line. Almost 10 seconds later — TWEET! TWEET! She is released. Two more short blasts signal her turn to go and she’s off. The crowd roars.

 

Eight roller girls are already halfway around the rink, and she is supposed to catch up — fight her way through the bunch, then proceed to pass them — on skates, without falling.

Within 20 seconds, she has lapped the rink once. Her nervousness is long gone — obliterated — shot by assurance after having heard the shouts and screams of 500 supporters packed into Cass Park.

She raises her wide-eyed baby blues to the crowd. Giggling, she’s just happy to see people showed up. Head back down, she is on a mission: penetrate the pack. As she does this she knows, without looking back, that the players she leaves behind are dropping left and right.

Danine plays roller derby for Ithaca’s first and only all-female roller derby team, the SufferJets. And she’s damn good at it, too.

The modern-day version of the game, originally designed in 1935 as a co-ed,

marathon-inspired multiday event, is structured as a series of two-minute sprints or “jams” in  games or “bouts” played by female-dominated leagues.

It’s Oct. 11, during the seventh jam of the SufferJet’s last home bout in their inaugural season — and one of the rare occasions that Danine takes over the role of “jammer.” One from each team is set up 30 feet behind the pack at the start of each jam: The first to break through the pack instantly becomes the “lead jammer,” and like the quarterback of a football team, is responsible for dictating the play.

She can now gain points by passing players from the opposing team. Danine does this with ease and gathers three points, giving the SufferJets a 10-point lead.

Usually, Danine blocks in a bout, keeping the attitude of a linebacker. She pushes opposing players down, allowing her team’s jammer to more easily pass through.

With the body of a fit 20-year-old (she’s actually 33), Danine is no Lawrence Taylor, but her aggression — which she delivers quietly and with a smile — makes up for her diminutive mass.

“You want Danine on your side,” said teammate Delilah Heshmat ’07, who goes by Golden Diapers on the rink, wearing yellow spankies to bouts, appropriately. “She’s a heavy hitter … and she’s laughing while she’s doing it.”

In the world of roller derby, Danine goes by ShitzNGigglz. It’s in this world that she wears her head-to-hip-length hair in long, braided pigtails bound by black-and-red bows. It’s where she paints her cheeks rosy pink and pulls up her black-and-white striped socks to her knees to reveal red hearts on top, the edge falling well below the tailored end of her gray soldier-style uniform.

“She’s real cute,” Heshmat said. “But you better just watch out.”

At work, in a different world, where she carries two cell phones — one for work and one for play — she’s the top dog at Ithaca College’s Tower Club. Her managerial job there, which she has had for about four years now, is a comfortable one for her. The hectic lifestyle of supervising a catering-oriented restaurant keeps her schedule inconsistent week-to-week, having similar spontaneity to the sport she plays. But she, like ShitzNGigglz, knows what she’s doing.

As soon as the club dies down for the day around 1:30 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon in October, she sits in her office and catches up with Jeff Scott, the director of dining services. The conversation between them is casual, work-and-weather related. Danine’s voice is light and sweet, barely competing with the clanking pots and pans of the clean-up kitchen crew downstairs, but Scott calls her a “rock star.”

She giggles at his comment. Smile lines grow from the tips of her lips and slowly take over her face. Covering her mouth with her hand, her laugh has a heartier tone than the treble she lets out when she speaks.

Scott has worked with Danine since he hired her seven years ago and is fully aware of her alter ego. His comment — one that would make her blush off the rink, but most likely not on it — is referring to a common fall tactic in roller derby called the “rock star,” where a player drops to the floor in a knees-to-the-ground, you-think-you’re-Gene Simmons sort of way. (Air guitar is optional, at the player’s own discretion.)

At work, with her blonde hair wound up in a tight spindle on top of her head, it wouldn’t appear that releasing the bun from its white scrunchie would send hair cascading down to her hip. In her Easter-egg pastel button-down, she doesn’t seem like the type of person who would be interested in spending her time rolling around a concrete rink, shoving other women to the floor for fun.

But apparently, she’s got a thing for wheels.

Beyond the set of roller skates she ties up with black-and-white laces, she’s got two Harley Davidsons parked in her garage — a Sportser 1200 and a Softail Deuce 1500, the biggest models available in their respective classes. The latter has a personalized license plate that reads, “Gigglz.”

She got her nickname by laughing her way through work and play. No doubt she’s dedicated, but she’s keen on finding the humor in things.

The SufferJets battled a Troy, N.Y., team — the Hellions of Troy  — Oct. 11. In between jams, Danine clapped along to the beat of Ithaca College’s pep band and got the crowd pumped for the next round as opposing players like Bitches Bruze, Kitty Porn and Scarbucks skated around the rink in neon green and pink boas and spankies, and one in a Trojan-warrior helmet.

Across the rink, in charge of guarding the penalty box was the Vinyl Princess, a referee in drag: white leather thigh-high boots and a tighter, skirted version of a typical referee’s black-and-white stripes.

The game is about 30 percent performance, says Heshmat, but that figure might not settle as well with some of her teammates.

The tug-of-war between sport and spectacle has always existed in roller derby but has resurfaced with the sport’s latest revival in 2001. The establishment of the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association in 2004 has created a more serious, regulated sport for the associated leagues. However, the campy elements — inspired from the ’70s, when it was at its all time high in popularity, have remained with today’s game. The old-time bouts, featuring sometimes-scripted stunts like half-time pillow fights and penalty boxes called “spank alley,” were regularly scheduled at Madison Square Garden and are celebrated by certain current teams, but not all.

“Many [modern roller derby] leagues are struggling with the old ’70s smackdown stereotype of derby,” Kitty “Chairman Meow” Gifford, the manager of the SufferJets, said.

The Ithaca SufferJets will play along — “When we’re out there, I’m not really thinking about what I’m wearing,” Heshmat said. “Of course, [beforehand] when I’m getting dressed and excited I’m like yeah, I tailored my outfit so that it was a little shorter” — but that doesn’t keep them from playing hard.

Out of the 29 total jams that made up the Oct. 11 bout, the team fell behind the Hellions during only three of them — that’s about a 54-minute time slot of refusing to let their guard down.

In their multicolored fishnets, they’re unapologetically hard-hitting. Out of the rink, they’re a typical cluster of women in their 20s to 40s. They call themselves “roller girls” — although nothing beyond their likelihood to play dress-up reinforces the notion of immaturity that the name implies. When they’re together they talk  about everything from their children to their Ph.D. plans. They sound like women catching up over a cup of coffee who happen to be wearing Halloween costumes.

Sliced in between these discussions are segments of unconscious derby-talk: how well their fishnets fit that day or showing off their “rink burn” from the last bout — the only thing (beyond the uniforms) that call attention to the phenomenon they are a part of.

They are 15 to 20 large, depending on the day, a small portion of the growing trend that has an estimated 14,000 modern everyday American women now playing roller derby. The SufferJet’s slice includes mothers, teachers, writers, students at massage, acupuncture and graduate school: It’s a no-boys-allowed club for women who prefer a pair of skates to knitting needles or a couple of hours on the rink to a cooking class.

“We are ... cornered into a world [of] lunchtime jazzercise and evening slimfast worlds,” said Sarah “Sarabellum” Davidson. “There are women that need more than that to get a fix of exercise and community. Roller derby isn’t a diet or a sport. It’s a lifestyle.”

Danine says she most enjoys the opportunity to stay in shape and play with a team. Trilobite Me, who goes by Trisha Smrecak when she plays paleontologist in the “real world,” says she also enjoys the time she can spend with the team and avoid being with other paleontologists 24/7 — “as fun as they can be,” she says. Leigh Ann “Female Trouble” Ross-Joyce says it beats being at home, washing dishes.

The SufferJets have made it clear where they stand as a team.

“It’s brutal, it’s hard-hitting,” Chairman Meow said. “It’s sisterhood.”

They represent something greater than their individual athletic effort, or sometimes seemingly degrading aspects of the game. Their team name is an intimidating twist to the “suffragettes,” and they have adopted the ideals of women’s rights by embracing their sexuality and taking the feminist ideas of getting women out of the kitchen and into the office one step further: out on the rink, in one of the only contact sports where the rules are the same for women as they are for men.

“I hate politics,” Danine said. “We want to be heard, not just seen.”

Through the spectacle of it all, the team insists on being taken seriously. Of course, that’s not always what the audience is looking for.

“I just like to see people fall,” said Cornell University senior Chelsea Shelledy,  who was at the last bout watching her friend co-captain  Cruisin’ B Anthony (Beth Skwarecki) rock the rink.

Chairman Meow knows all about the bitter end of that. She fractured her left fibula during a practice at Cass Park last May and moved from co-captain with Danine to manager, knowing she couldn’t step off the rink completely.

She hopes to fully recover before her custom orange leather skates arrive.

For now she stands on the sideline next to her husband, Mark “Tiny Bubbles” Sarvary, who coaches the team from his expertise having played for the Hungarian National Roller Derby team. While she waits, she maintains the team as a nonprofit business model, organizing all the elements of each event and helping the team conquer its largest hurdle since its conception about a year ago: finding a new bout space.

Plans have been made to ice over the rink at Cass Park to accommodate for winter skating (every time you mention figure skating, the team scoffs). They have found a suitable rink for practice — a local church’s indoor basketball arena — but it’s not big enough to host a bout.

Many of the SufferJet’s loyal supporters show up to every home bout and pack the biggest rink Ithaca has — Cass Park — sitting on benches, bleachers, the floor. The people in the audience are often the same people who keep the team rolling.

They’re the members of businesses like Taber Street Auto, who have helped sponsor the team, along with the employees of local bars like Pixel Lounge and Felicia’s, which participate in a “Derby on Draft” system that donates a percentage of each purchased designated derby brew to the team.

Danine reigned in IC Scooter to help sponsor the team, along with her boyfriend to build penalty boxes and even her staff. Teri Podulfalski, a Tower Club server, contributed bench chairs from her father’s tent business to the last bout.

The Oct. 11 home bout, the team’s last of the season, in which it beat the Hellions of Troy 115–96 and brought its first-year record to 3–1, was a bittersweet one.

Danine, as co-captain and one of the original members of the team, looks to hold the team together and battle through a rink-less winter. Between raising money and maintaining its fan base, the team’s high hopes are to someday build their own rink for personal and public use. With an established rink, they could recruit enough new roller girls to form a second roller derby team in Ithaca.

Popularity will inevitably increase with the release of Drew Barrymore’s upcoming movie, “Whip It!,” a teen comedy featuring “Juno”-star Ellen Page, about a small-town girl escaping the life of pageantry she is set to live by joining a roller derby team. Female Trouble says the SufferJets are already thinking of bringing local recruits to the theaters to show possible players how the game is played on the big screen.

Danine knows she’ll have to look further than the 14th floor of the East Tower for recruits. While her staff supports her participation, they show no signs of joining anytime soon.

“What are you nuts?” Podulfalski said. “I value my body parts.”

In a work setting, Podulfalski can make Danine’s alter ego sound crazy, but Chairman Meow insists Danine’s best attributes are her “common sense,” “good spirit” and ability to take “big jobs with ease” — all characteristics she shares with ShitzNGiggles on the rink and which separate her from the stereotypical picture of a roller girl.

Well, for most of the time.

“I try to keep it cool,” Danine said. “Unless the referee is an idiot.”