Yi-Nan "Double Easy" Zhang, center with the pink stripe on her helmet, skates during the Denver Roller Dolls practice on May 26 at the Wagon Wheel Roller Skating Rink in Brighton. (Photo by Joe Nguyen/AsiaXpress.com)

Yi-Nan Zhang balances roller derby with electrical engineering

Caltech grad shows that electrical engineers can work hard, play hard in Denver Roller Dolls league

By Joe Nguyen, AsiaXpress.com

June 10, 2010

BOULDER – Yi-Nan Zhang lives a double life.

By day, Zhang is a firmware engineer for Brooks Automation in Longmont. But a completely different identity emerges when the sun sets and she enters the roller derby rink.

Adorned in skates, a helmet and pads galore, Zhang assumes the moniker "Double Easy." Her number, 238, is the decimal notation for her job and her electrical engineering major in college (0xEE equals 238). She skates along side competitors with colorful names such as "Berlin Brawl" and "Deadly Long Legs."

Zhang has been with the Denver Roller Dolls roller derby league since November 2009 as a member of the Shotgun Betties and the league's all-star team, the Mile High Club. Along with approximately 60 other women, who all hail from different daytime professions ranging from lawyers to graphic designers, she devotes most of her nights and weekends to the sport she loves.

"We do it because it's really fun," she said. "It's fun and for a woman, especially for somebody who has never been athletic before, it's really empowering for me."

Roller derby has been making a re-emergence in the past few years with leagues popping up in cities across the country. Zhang said Denver is one of the few cities in the country with two leagues – the Denver Roller Dolls and the Rocky Mountain Rollergirls – both of which have earned national recognition after their traveling teams finished third and fourth, respectively, in the Women's Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA) nationals last year.

For Zhang, her first encounter with the sport came in 2008, a year after graduating from the California Institute of Technology. After spending the winter skiing, she said, she looked for an activity that she could do during the summertime that was similar.

"I went rollerskating for my birthday, which was in May, and I thought it was a lot of fun, even though I didn't quite get it," she said. "I wasn't picking up my feet at all – I couldn't skate."

Finding an interest in roller skating, she said she went online and discovered an ad for roller derby. That night she went to the Silicon Valley Roller Girls practice and observed. The next day, she bought her gear and the day after she started practicing.

"They didn't have special training for newbies or anything, so I was just thrown in there," she said. " ... It was really tough because I didn't know how to skate, but everybody else was really supportive and they taught me."

Zhang quickly learned and soon became a jammer – the skater who can score points – in the league. She moved to Denver in 2009 and joined the Roller Dolls.

"(Roller derby) really changed my life. I didn't expect that," she said. "I was just looking for something to do as a hobby and I wanted to start working out because I never did that – I was never athletic, actually. I was looking for some people to hang out with, but then I started getting into it.

"It just changes your life, it's a whole new world out there."

The Denver Roller Dolls' next home bout will take place at 7 p.m. on June 12 at the 1STBANK Center in Broomfield. Tickets are $15. For more information, go to www.denverrollerdolls.org.