The State of Canadian Roller Derby. (And a new guide to help market across channels)

TL;DR: The number of Roller Derby leagues in Canada has dropped non-trivially in the last decade. Part of that is due to external forces, but some can be attributed to inconsistent marketing across channels that ends up targeting people who don't need marketing to.

#State of the Union

You might recall from How I Accidentally Went From Roller Derby Referee to Event Discovery Platform Creator that Events In Plain Sight started to help find Roller Derby Events. Well, over the last couple weeks I've gone through all the Canadian leagues that are in there, deleted the defunct ones, updated logos and seeded events when they were advertised. Sometimes you need to give flywheels a little bit of a hand to start spinning.

The original league list came from Derby Listing around 2017 and hasn't really had a lot of housekeeping since, but here is how things break down with this particular lens.

Nationally, the number of leagues went from 173 to 70 (-59%). Which seems big at first glance, but remember this is almost a decade of change captured in a single number. Were this done annually, we would have ended up at the same place, but in much smaller increments.

Here are the numbers broken down by province.

• BC: 44 -> 19
• AB: 32 -> 9
• SK: 15 -> 4
• MB: 6 -> 2
• ON: 50 -> 23
• QC: 11 -> 5
• NB: 6 -> 4
• NS: 4 -> 1
• PE: 1 -> 0
• NL: 1 -> 1
• YT: 1 -> 1
• NT: 1 -> 0
• NU: 1 -> 0

Nothing too too shocking there. Provinces with the largest / most urban centers had more to start, and ended up with more but dropped ~ 55 - 60% which roughly lines up with national average. The rest of this post is going to look at some reasons why this happened, a province-by-province breakdown, and then some quick marketing tips and a free guide to help promote events to get more people in the door. While it is being presented in context of roller derby, it applies to any group promoting events across multiple channels.

#Why the drop?

I'm going to break things down province-by-province, but before that, let's talk about the 'why'. Or possible 'whys.' I don't think there is any one thing we can blame for this. Some it just natural attrition, but there are 3 things that I think play a major role;

#COVID

This is obvious. I'm not sure there is a more respiratory pandemic unfriendly sport than roller derby. That stopped all the inertia the sport had, and there was quite a lot. In the larger markets, getting close to 1000 people at a bout was not unheard of. And then everything paused. And stayed that way for two years in some places.

In that time, people found other hobbies to fill the time that derby did, or realized they didn't need to be constantly healing from injury. And so when it came time to restart they decided to stay retired. Often these people were part of the leadership of the league which led to a experience gap running things. Some leagues were held together through sheer force of will of a few key people, and without it they just collapsed. Or if leadership returned, some leagues just didn't have the numbers to pay for space to practice / play without increasing dues to unsustainable levels.

#Loss of venue

Derby requires a lot of space to function. And the spaces that are willing to host a league are decreasing. Either the facilities are having year round ice, priority access is being given to other groups that rent more floor time, insurance premiums are being increased (it does tend to worry facility people when ambulances arrive at least once a year), or they got the floors redone and are worried about wheels/pads scuffing them. Oh, and the cost has, of course, gone up as well which has to be absorbed somehow -- primarily by increasing monthly dues.

All of these are, unfortunately, valid. Finding space is all about relationships. And if people change on either the derby side or venue side, it makes it complicated.

#'Support your local girl gang'

This one is 100% my opinion as I was an official, not a player [though married to one who played for 7 years]. But somewhere along the way, derby became less about 'supporting your local girl gang' and more about 'winning.' Part of this I think was the success of WFTDA (the organization that maintains the ruleset and runs the annual championship) in promoting itself. Teams now had a model of what 'success' looked like.

'We too' could be like Gotham or Rose City or Denver. No you couldn't. Their natural catchment is just too naturally large not just in population, but also average income and business density (for sponsorships, etc.) It is a large investment in time to train, and travel for bouts / tournaments that earn points. And money. And again, time -- roller derby is a sport [primarily] by women, for [primarily] women. A lot of whom are moms and don't want to be away all weekend from their families multiple times during the season. (Yes, they could come along, but that is a cost and doesn't factor in that they might have stuff scheduled as well.)

The pursuit of competitiveness led leagues to be less open [intentionally or otherwise] to people who were there for fun or just learning. Without new people coming in, leagues end up experiencing a death by a thousand cuts not to mention if someone had a negative experience, they are going to tell people about it further hurting the pipeline of people.

#Province Breakdown

Again, this is just the ones My Derby Diary has in its database. If it is missing any, and it likely is, either message the My Derby Diary page on Facebook or email Adam to get it added in.

#British Columbia

#Alberta

#Saskatchewan

#Manitoba

#Ontario

#Quebec

#New Brunswick

#Nova Scotia

#Prince Edward Island

#Newfoundland & Labrador

#Yukon

#Northwest Territories

#Nunavut

#Marketing derby back into growth (and free guide)

Roller Derby, like a lot of things, is something you don't wake up one day and say 'I want to strap on my skates and hit people!' The way it grows is by getting people to come to a bout, then get them to come to a fun skate session, then a learn-to-skate/'fresh meat' program ... and then they can plan.

Unfortunately, roller derby leagues are, erm, not always super awesome at marketing, so attendance at bouts is not as high as it could be if people knew about them. This became quite clear going through this exercise and visiting the team's presences across the various channels they have. This does make sense. Roller derby leagues are by-and-large volunteer / member driven, and not everyone is a marketer, or knows how to operate each channel.

(A website, and each individual social media platform is a 'channel' in marketing-speak. So is print and radio, but that's way out of scope for discussion here...)

Thankfully, addressing the problems I saw is relatively straight forward. And so I wrote up a Multi-Channel Marketing Guide to help. Again, this entire article is framed around roller derby, but this guide can help any group deliver a consistent message to their existing audience and help them grow it.

Here however is a tip that is specific to execution of roller derby bouts -- when its a double-header, always schedule the 'fresh' game second. The biggest draw you will get is when it is a skater's first or second bout and they have brought their friends and family. If you schedule it first, inevitably a large section of your audience has left midway through the second game. The exception to this suggestion is when the other game is a juniors game with lots of young players and it'll end late.

Have a community outside of roller derby that deserves better event discovery? Create your own community event directory and make it easy for people to find the events the community cares about. Event discovery should be easy.