09/13/2025
💜 THANK YOU, LASSEN CANYON NURSERIES 💜
This week, we skated our very last practice inside a strawberry warehouse.
Yep, you read that right. Since March, Shasta Roller Derby has been calling an empty warehouse at Lassen Canyon Nursery, Inc. our home. The floor wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t built for skating. But it was ours. And it saved us.
Here’s the truth: roller derby isn’t like other sports. There’s no big league funding, no cushy budgets. Our league is run entirely by skaters, for skaters. We volunteer our time, our skills, and our energy — and then we still pay monthly dues just to keep the lights on. The biggest cost we face? Practice space. And the biggest reason roller derby teams dissolve? A lack of one.
When Big League Dreams closed last summer, we lost that space. Suddenly, we were displaced. We practiced wherever we could — even on the pickleball courts at Enterprise Park in the blazing 100° Redding summer heat. We skated on cracked concrete that chewed up our wheels and toe stops, we made accidental enemies of the pickleball crowd, and deep down, we worried: Would Shasta Roller Derby even survive?
We did what any desperate team would do: we scrambled. We scoured the internet for warehouses for lease. We cold-called the owners of vacant buildings, begging for a chance. We prayed to the derby gods that something — anything — would work out. And for a while, it really felt like we were running out of options.
That’s when Lassen Canyon Nurseries/Elwood Ranch stepped in. They handed us the keys to their unused strawberry warehouse and said, “Go skate.”
That act of generosity gave us more than just four walls and a floor. It gave us hope. It gave us time. It gave us the chance to keep training, to keep playing, to keep existing as a league. It meant we could save the money we desperately needed to afford practices at the Redding Sports Park this winter — without running out of money, without dissolving, without losing this team we’ve built with our sweat and love.
Without Lassen Canyon, we might not be here today. Period.
So as we rolled out of our last warehouse practice this week, we did it with full hearts and endless gratitude. Thank you, Lassen Canyon Nurseries, for keeping Shasta Roller Derby alive. You didn’t just give us a space — you gave us a future.
From the bottom of our hearts: thank you. 💜
Now… onto Bout Weekend! See you at the track 🥳
