Some girls play with dolls, some cook and some sew, but for graduate students Jessica “Whoop C. Daisy” Underwood and Shae “Evie Bola” Matine, they knock people down as members of the Red Dirt Rebellion Rollergirls derby team.

Underwood, an architecture graduate student, said she became interested in roller derby a year ago after hearing about it from a friend.

“I have a friend that plays derby in Tallahassee, and she e-mailed me some pictures of them, and they were on the cover of USA Today,” Underwood said. “I saw those pictures and thought, ‘Wow, she’s knocking people down. That looks like so much fun. If only Oklahoma had that.’ I wrote it off because I assumed it didn’t exist [in Oklahoma].”

Underwood said she researched the possibility of a league in the Oklahoma City area and found Red Dirt Rebellion. She thought it sounded interesting and tried out two weeks later.

Her inexperience led to her derby name, Whoop C. Daisy.

“I couldn’t skate when I started, so I thought if I never learned to skate very well — if I fell — I could just say ‘whoopsie,’” Underwood said. “But, if I got good at it and knocked somebody down, I could play with it and say ‘whoopsie.’”

Underwood said the name picks the player.

“You have to see what fits your personality,” Underwood said. “People were trying to help me pick my name, and they were coming up with sexy names or mean names, and that just wasn’t me.”

Underwood said all of the names are entered into a national roster, where a moderator either accepts or rejects a name depending on availability, so that no player has the same name as another participant.

“It’s not a law, just a courtesy to other players [so] you don’t have the same name,” Underwood said. “There are people that have been playing since [2001], so that’s eight years of people picking names.”

ROLLER DERBY HISTORY

Roller derby began in 1935 as a marathon race in Chicago sporting both male and female players, according to baycitybombers.com. Evolving throughout the 1960s, roller derby became a popular spectator sport with stylized, choreographed routines, much like professional wrestling, according to the site.

The sport declined in the 1980s and 1990s but resurfaced in 2001 with a couple of changes, Underwood said. The leagues and teams are primarily made up of amateur girls instead of paid mixed-gender teams. And the events are no longer staged.

Underwood said the competition is all real, with nothing laid out beforehand. And, as with any sport, roller derby has its own set of risks.

“Lots of bruises, injuries like sprained ankles or knees and broken ribs occur every now and then,” said Rebellion head coach Emily “Suzi Uzi” Murray. “But with any sport there are risks associated. It’s the same kind of risk that you would have in football or soccer.”

For Underwood, the rewards outweigh the risks.

“[The best part of roller derby] is the stress relief,” Underwood said. “If I’m having a bad day, I always feel better when I get [to practice] and get a few good hits in.”

Matine, a library science graduate student who has been into derby for two years, describes it as a social experience.

“I didn’t have any friends when I moved down from northwest Oklahoma when I got married,” Matine said. “Now, I have a lot of friends.”

WHAT THEY SKATE ON

The Red Dirt Rebellion Rollergirls are one of only seven teams across the nation to play on a banked, instead of flat, track.

“[Banked tracks are] just really expensive to build and warehouse,” Underwood said. “So it’s easier to go flat to begin with for new roller derby leagues. That’s one of the major challenges we’ve faced as a league — we set out to be the bank track league in town.”

Fundraising aided in the process of the track’s creation, but the construction received its biggest boost from an unlikely source: Hollywood.

“The track in the movie ‘Whip It’ is this track [we play on],” Underwood said. “We rented it to them for filming, which helped us raise the rest of the money to build and ship it. We’re really excited and fortunate that our track is a movie star.”

For Murray, roller derby was a catalyst to come out of her shell and influence a change in career.

“I was always really shy when I was growing up, and I did not grow into becoming an outspoken person until I found roller derby,” Murray said. “I really like coaching. It’s become something that I’ve grown a passion for, and it’s made me consider a more sports-oriented career.”

The girls compete in bouts with other derby teams for little more than bragging rights.

“We don’t get paid,” Murray said. “But we gain a sense of pride and community within the girls. It makes them work harder.”

Murray said roller derby isn’t for everyone, but dedication is key if someone wants to pursue the sport.

“It takes a lot of endurance and hard work,” Murray said. “But if they try hard enough, they’ll succeed.”

The Red Dirt Rebellion Rollergirls’ next bout is Nov. 14 in Corpus Christi, Texas, and their next home bout is Dec. 11 at the Cox Convention Center in Oklahoma City.

For more information, visit www.reddirtrebellion.com.