Does (city) size matter?

A lot of things go into making a great Roller Derby team. Knowledge, experience, practice, hard work, and talented people. But how do you attract all the people you need to create the Derby team of your dreams? It can be difficult to find all the myriad of skills and hard workers. One of the easiest ways to ensure that you have access to all of the skill sets you need is to be in an area that has access to lots of different people. In other words, be in a large city. 


Here is a quick break down of teams by WFTDA rank, and the population of the metro area the team is located in (in thousands)

1. Kansas City - 1,991
2. Texas - 1,716
3. Nashville - 1,671
4. Houston - 6,108
5. Atlanta - 5,269
6. No Coast - 302
7. Tampa - 2,783
8. Omaha - 865
9. Green Country - 937
10. Dallas - 6,372
11. Memphis - 1,316
12. Hard Knox - 698
13. Gold Coast - 5,565
14. Tallahassee - 367
15. Duke City - 887
16. Northwest Ark - 472
17. Oklahoma V. - 1,253
18. Big Easy - 1,167
19. Dixie - 417
20. ICT - 623
21. Assassination - 6,372
22. West Texas - 285
23. Alamo City - 2,142
24. Spindletop - 389 

If you graph it out it is hard to get any information out of it simply because there are a few cities that are so large they make it difficult to see any trends. But if you average it in groupings you will see something interesting. 

Ranking by average City Population

• Average of rank  #1 through #5: 3,351
• Average of rank #6 through #10: 2,252
• Average of rank #11 through #15: 1,767
• Average of rank #16 through #20: 786
• Average of rank #21 through #24: 1,962

The last grouping is thrown off by Assassination City, which happens to be in Dallas, so Dallas is double listed here. But you can see a solid trend. The larger your team's city, the higher likely hood there is of you being a highly ranked team. There are likely many contributing factors, but are all tied to city size. 

The first contributing factor is the age of your league. However, we can prove that the larger a city is, the older the team is, simply because the more people you have the more likely someone is to have founded a league. If you sort the teams by population, and then average the amount of time they have been WFTDA member leagues, you get this. 

Average city population by age in WFTDA

• Highest 5 Populations: 5 Years
• 2nd Highest 5 Populations: 5 Years
• 3rd Highest 5 Populations: 4.6 Years
• 4th Highest 5 Populations: 4 Years
• 5th Highest 5 Populations: 3.6 Years

This is pretty clear. The larger your city, the more likely it is you have been a long standing WFTDA member league. Therefore, city size is still the controlling factor here, as it ties directly into the age of your league. 

While I can't find all the information on when a league first started practicing, I can find information on how long they have been in WFTDA. 

Age by WFTDA ranking. 

• Average of rank  #1 through #5: 5.4 Years
• Average of rank #6 through #10: 4.2 Years
• Average of rank #11 through #15: 3.6 Years
• Average of rank #16 through #20: 4.4 Years
• Average of rank #21 through #24: 3.8 Years

Again, we get a trend, some correlation, but no clear causation. Simply that the longer a team has been around, they better they are. In general. 

Finally, there is tradition. By tradition I mean a skating tradition. Teams in the north and east have a tradition of hockey, while the Midwest has speed skating out the wazoo. The true south has little tradition of skating anywhere. While this puts them at an initial disadvantage, the teams that are present are creating the traditions, so this will be something that matters less. Also, I can't think of an easy way to convert this into numbers. 

So what is throwing the numbers off? We'll look at a few cities that don't quite fit the mold. 

Assassination City: Population 6.3 Million, been a WFTDA member league since 2005. Unfortunately they happen to share their city with Dallas, long time top 7 or so team. People are likely to flock to a larger higher ranked team simply so that they can benefit from their experience. They have picked up a few good skaters recently with Dallas's implosion, so look for Assassination city to conform to the numbers better. 

Oklahoma Victory Dolls & Big Easy Rollergirls: Populations greater than 1 Million, and WFTDA member leagues since 2005. I'm not sure what is keeping them back right now, but both are moving up in the rankings. I expect them to fit the statistics better soon. 

Gold Coast: Population 5.5 Million, been a WFTDA member league for just about a year. Gold Coast debuted at the 13 spot, but given a series of strong performances look for them to move up as time goes on. 

What is my conclusion? About the same as what I said at the beginning. Having your league in a large city gives you multiple benefits. You are likely to have been founded earlier; thus, giving you a head start on experience, and you have a larger population of people to draw from to fill your skill sets. You can look at the graphs and see it isn't the most important factor in a league's placement in the rankings, but it sure doesn't seem to hurt any. 

This doesn't even get into league size which I guarantee is a large factor as well. Unfortunately many leagues seem to not put that sort of information out in the open, and many leagues are quite fluid in their membership.