Playing The Field: Katie Bricco

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Buce Burna

In Playing the Field, we profile women who are making an impact in the world of sports, either in competition or behind the scenes. For this installment, we spoke with Brewcity Bruiser Katie Bricco.

Roller derby has gone through many iterations over the past 40 years. Always at least slightly on the fringes of society, derby brings to mind many mental images, from fishnets to skulls and crossbones. It’s likely everyone reading this has a pre-conceived notion about roller derby. It’s also likely those notions are wrong. While it may involve derby names and personas, fishnets and hot pants, the highly competitive and athletic sport played by the women of Milwaukee’s Brewcity Bruisers league is about way more than counterculture and girl power.

Katie Bricco, captain of Maiden Milwaukee and an attorney at the state public defender’s office in Waukesha, maintains that not only is derby a sport, but it’s a demanding one that requires a high level of stamina, strength and athletic ability. Though she went to her first derby practice in Virginia with only the vaguest idea of what it would be about, she kept returning and continued to play when she moved back to Milwaukee because it was an athletic challenge.

2015 Maiden Milwaukee

Scott Winklebleck and Jim Dier

Looking for a way to meet people when she was living in Virginia for college, Bricco answered a Craigslist add for her local derby league. She competes in distance running competitions in her off-season, so a beer league softball game wasn’t going to meet her athletic demands.

“Part of what drew me to it, just conceptually, was the fact that I didn’t know much about it,” she said. “It caught my attention. I think I like to do things that are interesting and tell a story and the fact that I was like, ‘This is a story, no matter what; this sounds fun.’ So that’s why I started. But then what really drew me to it was just how athletic it really was.”

And while derby presents Bricco with the athletic and physical challenges, she knows that ultimately she could get that elsewhere. What she gets from roller derby that she never found elsewhere was a chance to find her confidence and explore all aspects of her personality.

Though on the surface it seems unlikely that a public defender would find overlap in her derby career, Bricco said the things derby has given her personally have carried through to her day job. She has found herself feeling edgier and more flamboyant in a career not known to embrace such traits. But balance is key, she said, and she likes the one she’s found.

Knowing that she’d need to have her career and her derby life coexist, Bricco’s derby name and persona reflect her job. She is known as Super Hera and her number is four capital I’s to represent Roman columns. She wears and H on her chest reminiscent of Superman’s S seal, a cape and has the tagline “here she comes to save the day.”

Katie Bricco aka Super Hera

Bruce Burna

“The thing that I didn’t anticipate is how this hobby would really change the way that I approach a lot of the things that I do in my life,” she said. “I say that because I love playing roller derby. I don’t live and breathe roller derby the way that some skaters do. And I think that’s OK. Even knowing that that’s the case, I have met so many people, I have had so many community experiences and overlap between my job and people that I meet in roller derby, the way that I approach problems is different.”

Learning to channel her energy, to uncover previously unleashed parts of herself and to let go of insecurities are just some of the many things Bricco says derby has given her.

“The fact is that going through law school or my job as a lawyer, you have that stress that you need to get away from and you need to have that mental break,” she says. “Some of it is that. But a lot of it is the confidence that you have when you get to have this alter-ego. Super Hera is focused. Super Hera is confident. Super Hera doesn’t wear pants to bars, you know, because we leave roller derby events and we’ve got tights and hot pants on and at some point you realize, ‘I’m in the grocery store and I don’t have pants on and it just doesn’t matter.’ Feeling just more confident in who I am generally has been such a great and unexpected byproduct.”

Brewcity Bruisers is a non-profit league. None of the players or officials get paid. All members of the league participate in community activities. The growth of the league has included leagues for younger girls who are learning the same confidence that Bricco speaks so freely about.

Bruce Burna

“What’s great about our league, because it’s an all volunteer league and we don’t get paid, is that people are there because they really want to be there,” she says. “People put a lot of time into being involved. We have people of all walks of life that are involved in our league. To me that’s what makes it so great to play. You meet people who are so interesting and have so many stories. When you’re on the track, you get to put that all aside and just play. But when we’re off the track, these are some of the best people we have in our city, just there to have a good time and to push themselves. It’s unlike anything else I’ve ever been in.”

The 1970s version of derby—the only one many perspective fans are familiar with—was highly sexualized. It was at times cutesy. It wasn’t particularly flattering or empowering to women. The revamped version of derby that came about in the early 2000s was in some ways a reaction to that. The female roller derby players that started out at that time wanted to reclaim the game. But Bricco says this isn’t much the case anymore. She said that while she and her teammates are empowered by their own ability and level of play, anyone who tries to join the league with purely ideological motives will likely find they can’t keep up with the physical demands.

There’s an inherent contradiction in roller derby, Bricco admits. While she’s adamant about it being taken seriously as a demanding, physical sport, she understands that she and her league-mates themselves are part of what undermines people’s ability to see it as a real sport.

“The sport is conflicted in some ways,” she says. “We in some ways perpetuate that. If we really wanted to be just athletes, then having roller derby names wouldn’t be very important. We do, still, some of us anyway, wear things that are cute or sexy, with fishnets or our derby skins or hot pants. If it really was just about the sport and only the sport, then why aren’t we wearing basketball uniforms, or whatever? I don’t mind. I think that’s part of the great part of the game, that there’s still this show and this alter-ego. But I think that sometimes because of that people don’t take us as seriously.”

Seven years into her derby career, Bricco has been lucky to have a concussion be her most serious injury. She says she’s thought about leaving this part of her life in the past, but ultimately she continues to see it as a boon.

“I think I will stop doing roller derby when I feel like it’s taking more out of me than it’s giving me,” she says. “Until that’s the case, I guess I’ll keep coming back.

“Both parts of my world are different, but they have ended up being able to overlap very seamlessly,” she continues. “Roller derby has continued to give me opportunities to grow that have kept me there. It makes me more confident and gave me a lot more life skills.”

The Brewcity Bruisers host their season-opening bout on Saturday, Jan. 17 at 7 p.m. at the UW-Panther Arena, 400 W. Kilbourn Ave.