Under the fluorescent lights at Cascade Indoor Sports, women in helmets and kneepads roller-skate casually around the rink. This calm atmosphere, of course, does not last. Upbeat music playing over the speakers gives way to whistles blowing, pads crunching and skates clopping on the rink’s flat surface.

The Lava City Roller Dolls are Bend’s professional roller derby league. Made up of three teams — an A team, B team and junior squad — Lava City travels around the Pacific Northwest for bouts with competitors in the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association.

Club president Ashley Arbow, whose derby name is “Cruella Despill,” says the WFTDA is like the NBA or NFL of women’s roller derby. The Roller Dolls’ A team finished 138th out of 348 teams in the WFTDA global rankings last season.

“It’s a good stress release,” Arbow, 28, says. “You could have the worst day, and then you could come to a practice and feel so much better about yourself. Everybody lifts you up and makes you feel a lot better.”

While they lift each other up, the Roller Dolls knock other teams down. Roller derby is an intense, sometimes brutal sport, and it can take a toll on one’s body.

Bouts consist of two 30-minute periods split into “jams” of two minutes or less. During a jam, five players from each team are on the track at a given time — four playing the role of “blocker,” and one as the “jammer.” Basically, the jammers score points for every opponent they lap each time around the track, and the lead jammer can call off the jam to prevent a trailing opponent from scoring additional points. The blockers’ goal is to stop the opposing jammer (and help out their own) by any means necessary.

Make sense? Good. You are almost ready to be a Roller Doll. All that is left is the physical training required to skate around a track and knock some people around. Seems easy enough, right?

Nope.

“You have to have a lot of strength to play roller derby,” Arbow says. “It’s very physical, so just like any other athlete you’re cross-training in addition to practicing on skates.”

Most of the Roller Dolls played other sports growing up, and some have other athletic pursuits outside of derby. For a time, Sarah “Cutthroat Callie” Callegari played rugby in addition to roller derby. But, eventually, a concussion in rugby was enough for her to quit the sport.

At 38, she has stuck with roller derby for almost a decade. It has been an effective way to stay in shape, she says, but the greatest benefit is a sense of community.

“I’ve played sports my whole life,” Callegari says. “The biggest thing that’s kept me around is the camaraderie. I’ve never been around a sports team where people literally take care of each other. It really is a support system.”

Skaters come from many walks of life. Callegari says the Lava City roster includes nurses, government workers and probation officers, among other vocations. Some of the Roller Dolls came up through the juniors program, which is overseen by Callegari and her sister Jayna Gurule. The program welcomes girls (and boys) age 8 and up, and when female skaters enter their senior year of high school, they can choose to stick with the junior team or move up to the adult teams.

Sierra “Darth Maully” Klapproth was part of the first class of Lava City’s junior skaters when she was in fourth grade. After reading the book that inspired the 2009 movie “Whip It,” and later seeing the movie, Klapproth told her dad she wanted to start roller-skating. When he took her to the rink, she saw a flyer advertising the Roller Dolls’ juniors program and felt compelled to sign up.

Now, Klapproth is 18 and entering her first season with the adult team. She says the practices and bouts provide a reprieve for her from two jobs and the other daily pressures of life.

“Roller derby helped me gain confidence and maintain a really strong personality and image, one that everyone now knows me for,” Klapproth says. “Having a constant group of people that I knew I could go to no matter what, that was the best part. I call some of them my ‘derby moms.’”

— Reporter: 541-383-0307, rclarke@bendbulletin.com