Sheffield skater fundraising to go to Roller Derby World Cup

A 17-year-old boy from Sheffield is raising money after being selected to compete in the Junior Roller Derby World Cup in Australia this summer.

Tom Halsall – also known by his roller derby nickname Atomic Bomb – will be representing Team GB in the sport he has played since he was nine years old when he began training with Sheffield Steel Roller Derby.

He will be among 20 teenagers heading to Brisbane where they will compete against teams from the US, Canada, Australia, Belgium and France.

However, as the niche sport currently attracts no government or commercial support, each of the players is having to fund their own trip Down Under.

Team GB head coach Jonathan Emery, who has led the team for two years, said: “It is both amazing and terrifying – getting 20 skaters to the other side of the world,” he says.

“It’s quite a niche sport. Most big cities or towns have an adult league and it’s quite a female-led sport.

“Most male-led [sports], especially football, rugby, have a women’s team, whereas roller derby was born from a female league and then there’s a few of them that have juniors.”

Both Tom and Jonathan agree what they love about the sport is how inclusive it is.

“It’s probably the most inclusive sport I know, it doesn’t matter about body shape, gender, anything like that,” said Jonathan.

“It’s quite at the cutting edge, especially around gender and support of our transgender members.”

Tom said it was his mother who introduced him to the sport.

“My mum was involved with the adult team and they wanted to put together a junior team and so they put out a couple of tasters and I went to one of them.

“I’ve been doing roller derby ever since,” he said.

“It has an absolutely great community. If it was just a game it’s already great, but with the community it also has – even if it is a small community relative to other sports – it makes it that much greater.”

While some local teams include children as young as seven, Team GB is aged between 13 and 18 as Jonathan says it is important members have the emotional maturity to cope with the pressures of the World Cup.

“The World Cup is very different from playing a game,” he says.

“You’ll go into a foreign country. You are in front of a full audience. You’re on a live stream and the pressure is very different.

“We take some younger skaters, they may not get as much playing time as other skaters, but they get that experience and they’ll be able to bring that to future World Cups.”

With this year’s event hosted in Brisbane, each member of the team needs to raise about £5,000. Tom’s GoFundMe page has currently raised more than £1,300 towards his target.

For Jonathan, it is a concern the cost is too much for some players.

“Unfortunately I have lost one or two skaters previous to this because they realised they were unable to afford it, which is very sad.”

There’s no escaping the fact financial problems do affect the team’s potential – as does the fact it is a niche sport in the UK.

“France and USA are probably the two best teams,” says Jonathan.

“We have 400 junior skaters across the UK in total, but America has that in each city.

“One of our coaches flies from Denver to help and she has 300 children in her whole league. So you can imagine how competitive it is.

“The American team get 2,000 skaters coming to their try-outs. So they have a very high-level team, which we probably are not going to compete with.

“And France is lucky enough, because it is a national team, that their government pays for all their training, pays for their kit and stuff like that. So they have a massive advantage.”

For Tom, who is also studying A-levels in engineering, physics, and government and politics, his main concern is balancing practice with revision.

But the long journeys across the country for matches, are providing much-needed study time.

“It’s quite difficult and it is a bit stressful, but I’m trying to keep as calm as possible.

“There’s a lot of time just driving from place to place in the hopes that you’ll get a few hours of play and so that is also soaking up quite a lot of time, but I am managing it,” he says.