WFTDA News

WFTDA Leadership and the Competitive Play Committee are pleased to announce our plans for WFTDA roller derby events in 2022. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to be an enormous challenge for our world and our sport, we want to bring our members from all over the globe together so that we can begin to heal and rebuild our community. With that in mind, this plan was crafted with four core values: community, flexibility, competition, and public health.

With the unpredictability of COVID and its effects on our member leagues’ ability to return to play, in conjunction with an effort to critically examine our competitive structures, WFTDA Rankings and Postseason Tournaments (i.e. Playoffs and Championships) will remain on hold for the 2022 season. We’ll use this time to continue assessing our global structure, and concretely define a plan to redevelop those programs to better serve our membership.

For 2022, we want to highlight and support WFTDA Member Leagues from around the world as they safely return to gameplay, in an international celebration of roller derby. This plan was designed to be more flexible and accessible than the WFTDA Postseason of the past, with the opportunity for any WFTDA league anywhere in the world to participate.

What’s the plan?

• We will be seeking to showcase and support WFTDA Member League-hosted events during the months of September and October.
• WFTDA teams and leagues of all sizes and levels will be encouraged to host and participate in roller derby events anywhere that it's safe to do so to be a part of this event.
• Events should use The Rules of Flat Track Derby, but we are actively exploring the possibility of including formats that provide flexibility in the number of participants and venue size, if they are better suited to the needs of the event.
• WFTDA will provide support and resources to help in planning, marketing, and broadcasting these events.
• WFTDA Broadcast plans to collaborate with event hosts to stream this global, two-month event, to give everyone a chance to watch international roller derby live! We will accept applications from all interested event hosts and will provide support to as many events as physically and technologically feasible.

What does WFTDA provide?

• A committee will be formed to assist event hosts and participating leagues with matchups, COVID-19 risk management, event planning needs, and a variety of other logistical support.
• WFTDA will assist and provide branding and social media promotion of all events.
• Pre-event education to help prepare leagues for this 2022 set of events.
• COVID-19 risk management example policies that leagues can choose to implement for these (and other) events.

Who can participate?

• These events will be open to teams of all levels in the WFTDA (including charter teams as well as B/C/D teams from any league), allowing us to bring together and showcase a broader range of our membership.
• Events of all sizes will be included, from single-header games with existing or temporary teams to multi-team, multi-day, multi-track events.

Let’s make it happen!

Our hope is that this plan will help bring our community together and provide more of our members with some exciting and long overdue opportunities to play or watch roller derby, while acknowledging the need for flexibility during the time of COVID.

We can't wait to see what we're able to accomplish together in 2022!

We want to hear from you.

We’ll have more details to share with you in the coming weeks, including our full proposal in a downloadable format and applications to sign your league up to host or attend an event, as well as an invitation to meet with us and help plan WFTDA Competitive Play in 2023 and beyond! We’re working to finalize as much as we can, as soon as we can, but if this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that flexibility and adjustment is what will see us through. We will keep you updated on important developments here on the WFTDA Online Community and via our WFTDA Confidential Newsletter, so make sure you’re opted in to those emails in the “Edit My Information” section of your Member Portal account if you want to stay in the loop (contact your league’s WFTDA admin or portal@wftda.com if you need assistance with your account). [How to join or add your league members to the Online Community]

If you have any feedback or questions, please let us know! This event is all about our community, and we spoke with several leagues while formulating this plan, but we want to hear from you as well. If you would like to work with us on competitive play plans, or have any questions, ideas, resources, or anything else to share with us about our plans for 2022, please submit this form and we’ll respond accordingly as soon as we can.

You can download a report of what we learned in our member league listening sessions here.

From your WFTDA Competitive Play Task Force,

Authors
Bones (WFTDA Senior Director of Programs)
DiFibrillator (Golden City Rollers, WFTDA Board Member)
Tifa Knoxhard (Santa Cruz Roller Derby, WFTDA Board Member)