This weekend, Arizona Roller Derby will hold its sixth annual Cactus Cup competition, Tinisha Bonaby will be there, teaching clinics for newcomers and veterans alike a little something about the rough and tumble sport.
Bonaby is a roller derby player and coach who goes by the name Freight Train.
But, when The Show spoke with her she began with her love of skating, which she began when she was just 2 years old with her dad. By the time she was a tween, she was dance skating.
Full conversation
TINISHA BONABY: Will be called rhythm skating. Some people call it jam skating. When I was younger, of course, I always grew up in the rhythm skating world at Almeda Skating Rink in Houston, Texas. But I didn't really start getting into some of the more technical skills of rhythm skating until I was like 10, 11, 12. So that could mean doing the, the move downtown or crazy legs, spinning.
LAUREN GILGER: Wait, what's crazy legs?
BONABY: It is a, it's a dance skating skill where you are moving your legs in a certain pattern. I could show you what that is.
GILGER: Too hard to describe on the radio. OK, no problem, no problem.
BONABY: Footwork, shuffle skating skills that you can do in the middle of a skate floor.
GILGER: Super cool. OK, I think I can guess. So it was later on when you were in college that you got into roller derby, right?
BONABY: I was introduced to it by my dad because he was getting his skates fixed at a local skate shop called Montrose Skate Shop. The guy who owned the place was Mr. John, and he was really into roller derby.
So he asked my dad, did he have a daughter? And then, of course, my dad said yes. And he gave my dad a flier, and my dad gave me the flier.
GILGER: So what did you think when you first got on a roller derby rink? Like, was this kind of revelatory for you? Were you like, this is awesome and I love this?
BONABY: So as you can imagine, I like roller skating. I love roller skating. I always have. So I was kind of excited about it because it was a sport played on roller skates. I will say that me and my brothers were looking at roller derby in the middle of the night before I joined, and we was looking at some of the old school roller derby where, you know, they was getting hit in all kinds of ways and flying right off the track and all that stuff. So I had mixed feelings about it because I just didn't know what to expect.
GILGER: Right.
BONABY: But I'm really glad that I joined.
GILGER: Right, so roller derby is a sport, but I think a lot of folks might think about roller derby and think about kind of an old version of it where it was almost like professional wrestling. Like there were moves, fights, things like that happening that were kind of planned.
BONABY: Yeah.
GILGER: What's it look like today?
BONABY: Well, so there's many different variations of roller over. The one that I play is under the WFTDA organization, and it's played on a flat track. OK, so there are still some leagues that play on a bank track, like what you would have saw on TV, but now we play it on a flat track because it's more accessible to leagues all over the world, right?
Not everyone can have a bank track. It's mostly played on a flat track, but we have defined rules and, you know, under those rules, we play the sport and there's no theatrics or fakeness involved at all. It's real people hitting each other off the track and down and jump in and all the other stuff. So none of this planned. It's all skilled and strategic.
GILGER: And you can get kind of beat up, right?
BONABY: You can. You definitely can. I wouldn't let that deter you or deter others from joining roller derby, though. It's a really great sport to be a part of. But yes, sometimes you can get bumps and bruises and things like that.
GILGER: So you went on to kind of be really involved in roller derby. You still are. You teach it now, obviously. You joined the Texas Roller Girls, though, when you were younger, which was an incredibly influential, I understand, team in roller derby.
BONABY: Yeah, so I did three years with Houston Roller Derby and then I decided to try to take my skills to the next level by moving to another team that was nearby who were higher ranked, which was the Texas Roller Girls.
So what's significant about the Texas Roller Girls is they are the ones that revised the roller Derby, the modern day roller derby. They brought it back in. Now it's grown to a whole bunch of leagues all over the place.
GILGER: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Including here. So you'll be here this weekend as part of Arizona's Roller Derby's Cactus Cup, right? So you're going to be teaching folks how to roller derby.
So tell us, like, what do we need to know first?
BONABY: Well, some of the folks that will be coming in, they will already have some roller derby skills under their belt. What I'm going to try to do is define those skills and get them as an individual to understand the way that I play, which will hopefully inspire them to think about how they play the sport of roller derby.
So for me, I have certain things that I do to jam in the way that I jam. Does that make sense? I don't know if you've seen roller derby before, but I have a very particular style.
GILGER: OK, so tell us, like, what's your particular style?
BONABY: Yeah so I'm more of a punchy, hitting, pushing type of jammer. So I do know how to jump around and be agile, and you can jump and move pretty quick. But I'm mostly known for hitting people out of the way or kind of blasting through the wall.
What I try to do is help people understand where to utilize some of the skills that I'm doing. So I'm not always pushing to be pushing. There's a certain time when I do it. There's a certain time when I hit people. So that's what I'm going to kind of go over.
And then on the second day, we'll be working on firming up some of our blocking and offense and general coordination. And that's kind of what I have planned.
GILGER: So folks can learn a lot from you this weekend, it sounds like.
BONABY: Yes, they can learn a lot from me this weekend. But I would say if you're a beginner person and you've never played roller derby before, the first thing you want to know how to do is learn how to skate forward and then be able to take a hit. So if I'm doing an introductory roller derby course, with someone completely new, those are the first foundational things we will learn.
GILGER: OK, so let me ask you before I let you go, Tinisha, how did you get the name Freight Train? Because I know everyone in roller derby has a name kind of like this, right?
BONABY: So what happened was when I played in my very first scrimmage back in Houston Roller Derby, I didn't have a name yet. When I came into the pack because I didn't know the rules, I hit the pack so hard that everybody flew away from me and fell down to the ground. So they said, if you don't have a roller derby name yet, we're just gonna call you Freight Train. So my name was given to me by one of my teammates, Becky Booty, back in Houston.
GILGER: All right. Sounds like it was an appropriate one, given your skillset.
BONABY: I thought it was pretty cool, so I kept it.
If you go
What: Arizona Roller Derby's Cactus Cup
When: March 20-22, 2026
Where: Ability360, 5031 E Washington St, Phoenix, AZ 85034
More information: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cactus-cup-2026-wftda-roller-derby-tournament-tickets-1980292799070
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