What began as a routine roller derby practice in April 2017 at the St. Louis Skatium led to one of the most traumatic and difficult journeys that Gabe Montesanti would ever have to face.
Monstesanti was practicing a 180 — a spin move that is typically simple — but she tripped in the process, leading to her fall and traumatic leg injury.
“I knew the bone was broken right away,” Montesanti said. “I could hear it crack.”
Montesanti didn’t want an ambulance. Instead, her teammates wheeled her to a car in a rickety old office chair and rushed her to the hospital.
This accident made her stop and question her priorities. But her teammates carried her through and showed her that this wasn’t just a sport but a community.
Montesanti’s biological family was not accepting of her queer identity, and she has been estranged from them for some time now. In joining roller derby, she found a place of acceptance, a new home, where you could come as you are and be welcomed with open and loving arms.
She took on the derby name Gabe “Joan of Spark” Montesanti. Her team, Arch Rival Roller Derby, would go on to claim victory after victory, and are now ranked second in the world. They will compete this November for a global title in Portland, Oregon.
Remembering the past
While moving from Bowling Green to St. Louis for grad school for creative nonfiction, a woman approached Montesanti and her now-wife at a coffee shop. She had a pitch to make.
“You look like you’re really tough,” Monesanti remembered the stranger saying. “You look like you could beat the crap out of somebody. You should come play roller derby.”
Montesanti took a flier, inspired by this woman’s compliment and bravado. She went to St. Louis Skatium’s recruit night in 2016 and was hooked right away.
“The rest was history,” she said. “I mean, I started breaking bones and I started making friends and I started falling in love with the sport.”
And break bones she did. Almost immediately she broke her thumb, making it impossible to write, the reason she came to St. Louis. Even with the broken bones, roller derby became her top priority — rising above almost everything else.
“This became my complete obsession, and it almost took over my relationship with my girlfriend and my relationship with my education,” Montesanti said. “I had to really check myself to say, ‘What are the important things in my life and what matters,’ and really hone in on, ‘OK, I’m here for an education. I’m here to be a partner to my girlfriend, who is now my wife. And roller derby comes down the list a little bit.’”
Supported through healing
After shattering her tibia and fibula, Montesanti was hospitalized for four days, and, thanks to a titanium rod, was able to start bearing weight after six weeks.
That healing journey was a pivotal time that showed her that despite the risk of injury, the derby team was not only her family but her home.
“They stayed with me at the hospital,” Montesanti said. “They created a meal train for me. So they were dropping off meals for me when I couldn’t do anything.”
This love solidified that roller derby was the place Montesanti belonged. Her definition of home formed around the team.
“The support from my chosen family made me want to be a better member of the chosen family itself,” Montesanti recounts. She paid it back by finding a way to help other injured players.
“I collected a bank of items after I healed myself, I collected wheelchairs and crutches and shower chairs and things that I didn’t know that I would even need to heal.”
Montesanti not only created the community supply but also built a spreadsheet to track who she loaned things out to. Derby inspired her to be a better person, she said.
“It makes me want to reach out to people who look like they might be having a bad day,” she added. “It makes me want to say hi to people … it really makes me want to be one piece of a moving unit rather than a singular person.”
All of this led Montesanti to write essays about roller derby and the passion she had for it. It helped her build and find a natural balance between school, her relationship and her roller derby career.
These essays culminated into Montesanti’s 2022 book "Brace for Impact," a title she took inspiration for from a phrase often said on the derby track, including, memorably, by a teammate who goes by Cruella Belleville.
“She said, ‘You really have to get low and brace for impact here, because you’re going to get hit hard.’ And I was just thinking how important of a line that is, both literally and metaphorically,” Montesanti said.
Through all of the bumps, bruises and breaks, St. Louis Skatium and Arch Rival Derby have become a sacred space for Montesanti.
“I think my definition of home is where I have agency,” Montesanti said. “And Arch Rival has given me the kind of agency that I haven’t had in a long time, and has given me the kind of empowerment that I haven’t experienced in a long time.”
