She made it look easy, but like anything in sports, the easier it looks on the track, field, or court, the harder it was to get there. The Gotham Girls Roller Derby league’s 2011 Rookie of the Year, Brazilian Nut, will attest to that.
“At first, I thought ‘I’ve got this,’” she said. “I felt like I could learn how to skate and get this, but it was really hard. I would come home after Queens practice and just cry and call my mom and be like ‘mom, I can’t move any part of my body, it’s just hurting so much.’”
That’s a lot to go through for something you pick up on a lark, but after seeing the 2009 Drew Barrymore derby film ‘Whip It,’ the Rio de Janeiro native – like so many others – needed to discover the sport on a more personal level.
“I said there must be some roller derby around here, so I found Gotham and I had no idea they were this awesome,” she said. “Now I’m completely obsessed with this sport and I just want to do roller derby all the time, and I could not have imagined that when I started. It’s crazy.”
It gets better though. Far from a natural on the track, despite playing basketball and soccer growing up in Rio, Nut (who moved to the US in 2009) had never skated before when she tried out for GGRD in 2010 and didn’t make the cut.
“Thinking back on it, it was a complete disaster,” she recalled. “It was terrible. I was falling all over the place, and I thought I was doing great, but it was not good.”
Disappointed, but not discouraged, she took a couple months off and started over in a recreational league, where she met some skaters from the Suburbia Roller Derby league. One thing led to another, and after five months working on her skills there in Suburbia’s Fresh Meat program, she gave Gotham another shot late last year. This time she made it, earning spots on the Queens of Pain and the Wall Street Traitors, where she averaged 24 and nearly 27 points per game, respectively, as a jammer for her teams.
Maybe more notable is that she also became a shining light for the growing roller derby scene in Brazil, which now had one of their own competing with the premier league in the United States. Contacted by leagues in Brazil, Nut made it a point to meet and skate with the local teams in São Paulo and Rio when she traveled back home for visits. Soon, the launch of this weekend’s Roller Derby World Cup in Toronto came up.
“I go there a couple times a year and every time I used to go there, I would skate with them,” she said. “One time I went to São Paulo to skate with some of the girls, and I used to live in Rio, so I usually stay there and when I do I go to all of their practices and I got to meet the coach and everyone else. Then I started the idea of getting everyone pumped up for the World Cup, and that’s when everyone decided that they wanted to go and that’s when we created a team.”
Team Brazil, as a unit, will enter Canada this week with no experience playing together at this level. But with management help from Brooklyn Bombshell captain OMG WTF, Nut joins experienced skaters from Germany (Lucifera Matadora of the Stuttgart Valley Rollergirlz), Canada (Lobster of the Capital City Derby Dolls), and California (Brazilian Bombshell of the South Bay Derby Mizfits). They take the track with fellow Brazilians who are fast learners and eager to impress. And this week’s tournament isn’t necessarily about shocking the world, but more about building the sport.
“In January when we started talking about this, we weren’t sure if we wanted to participate in the World Cup, but I convinced them that the whole point of the World Cup is not for us to get there and be the awesome team like Team USA,” Nut explains. “We want to get there and we want to learn. We’re focusing everything on the girls from Brazil, so they can bring back the experience. And I hope that we can really do our best together. It’s hard since we haven’t trained together and they don’t have the experience. So it’s going to be very challenging for us, but I’m hoping that we can pull it off and take really good things back home.”
Despite the ominous talent level of Team USA lurking behind every World Cup conversation, the fact is that even the tourney favorite hasn’t had a lot of track time together, so the team that does the best this week may be the one that meshes together when it counts. And as Nut points out, the skill level of the ladies from Brazil has grown by leaps and bounds since they first started skating.
“It’s come pretty far,” she said. “The first time I went there, they were still learning how to skate, and I feel that now they’ve progressed into a different stage where they’re focusing on scrimmaging and understanding where everyone is in the pack and what they have to do. And they pick stuff up really quickly. When I was there I had a really intense week with them and I was like ‘look, you need to build walls; this is how you build walls.’ And they would do it wrong once, but then the second time they would already be on it. They’ve progressed a lot this year.”
So has Brazilian Nut. This time in 2010, she had just earned a spot in the Gotham Girls Roller Derby league. A year later, she’s GGRD’s Rookie of the Year and representing her country in the sport’s first World Cup, and the scary part is that the experience she takes away this week is likely to make her even better.
"Personally, I think it (the World Cup) is gonna be good for me because it’s more playing time and I can experience new things,” she said. “I really hope I get to block a little bit because I don’t get to do that a lot in Gotham, so I hope that I can improve and learn. It’s also going to be hard for me because people are going to be looking at me for answers, and it’s not usually like that (Laughs). So it’s gonna be hard and it’s gonna be different, but I expect it to be very good and I expect to learn a lot after this tournament.”
Look out, 2012: Brazilian Nut is coming.
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Team Brazil begins World Cup play on Thursday, December 1st at 7:40pm against Sweden. They will play France (12:10pm) and Canada (2:50pm) on Friday, December 2nd.
Tune your browser to DerbyNewsNetwork.com all weekend for live coverage of the international action.
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