TAMPA – It’s about the quad roller skates they wore as kids and the fishnet tights and mini skirts they weren’t allowed to wear. It’s roller derby, and for a growing group of women in the Tampa Bay area, it’s back.

They’re the Tampa Bay Derby Darlins. They’re hairstylists, single moms, students, artists, broadcast producers and business owners. Some are big. Others are petite. Most have tattoos, and all have nicknames.

“I put it on my butt if you need the spelling,” Rachel Brown said, lifting her hot pink plaid skirt to reveal her roller derby nickname – Sophie O’Path – stitched across the back of her underwear.

A Derby Darlin sped by during a Tuesday night practice and smacked it.

“A sorority with violence,” Brown, 31, a cocktail waitress from Largo, called the new league.

Derby fever hit the rough-and-tumble Tampa scene this summer when Angela Kroslak, 24, of Riverview saw another derby league’s recruitment video.

The sport is played when two teams of five skate around a narrow track in pack formation.

Blockers stay low and stick together, trying not to let jammers from opposite teams break through their formation.

Jammers gain a point for every lap they make around blockers. To stop them, blockers try to wrestle and slam them off the track.

The roller derby presence in Tampa dates back to the 1930s but fell into obscurity after the 1970s.

In 2001, a grass roots movement picked up on the trail of nostalgia, hoping to revive the circuslike bouts, sexy suits and campy WWF-esque antics. Catalyzed by the underground indie crowd that thrives in rock concert mosh pits, roller derby has since spread to at least 40 cities.

Kroslak decided she’d plug into her nightlife network – women who hang out at Masquerade, Orpheum and the Hub – on MySpace.com and see who would be interested.

Recruitment parties turned into late-night practices at South Tampa’s United Skates of America, which gives them the rink after hours Tuesday nights so they can practice falling, skating and bumping one another off the track for the beginning of their season in April.

But for a group of women poised for combat, there seemed to be a whole lot of giggling at practice, to both the frustration and amusement of Sammy Johnson, a speed skating instructor in spandex shorts who coaches the Darlins for free.

He had the blockers squatting in formation, swinging their hips to practice butting jammers off the rink.

“You got a porch to go with that swing?” one Darlin called out from the group.

“You have this whole persona. When you’re in roller derby, it’s not your real self,” said Jessica Cameron, 34, of Tampa.

Cameron said all derby girls across the country choose nicknames for their alter egos. Nicknames are serious business – Cameron has her final choices narrowed down from a list of 50. She’s between Claudia Eyes Out and Ann Tagonize.

“You create this bawdy and raucous girl,” she said.

Geared up in her quads, knee pads, elbow pads and a helmet, Eva Gann, 22, of Clearwater applied hot pink ey e shadow to match her hot pink fishnets, which revealed a gun and holster tattooed to her thigh. Applying makeup before practice?

“Hell, yeah,” she said. The punk rock prom queen calls herself Evil Gabour.

Liz Karsa, 27, doesn’t need a costume or a cod e name to get rowdy in the rink. Towering above the rest, she’s there for one major reason: “I like to beat people up,” she said. “I do get in quite a few bar brawls. I tend to be the instigator.”

Most of them had never heard of roller derby, but Michelle L’Italien, 25, of Tampa had.

“Ever since I was little, I wanted to be a ballerina when I grew up, and my mom told me I was too clumsy to do that, and I would end up being a roller derby queen,” said the brunette in braids, a streak of blond running across her bangs. Call her Jane Danger. “I guess she got what she wanted.”

Some hadn’t been on skates since elementary school.

But there was something about roller derby that brought them to the league.

“I wasn’t motivated to go to the gym, and I’m too hyper for yoga,” said Erin Oswald of St. Petersburg.

The 33-year-old, whose two kids go to Catholic school, calls herself Joan of Ache. And when it comes to nights out with the Darlins, Oswald is no saint.

“We can lie and say it’s exercise and go out drinking afterward.”

For Cameron, it was a chance to release some pentup frustration.

“I have really bad road rage,” she said. “I find that when I’m on the road, if I just think Tuesday, I can let it all out, I can make it. I can drive to where I go and not kill somebody, because I know that I can take it out on these girls.”

Other would-be roller derby queens still have a chance to lace up for glory – the Darlins are still recruiting. Oswald said all recruits need is a good attitude and a free Tuesday night.

“You’re out there and you feel like you’re flying, even though you’re not,” Oswald said, “knowing that no matter what, if a girl takes you down, at the end of the night when you’re at the bar, you’re going to be her friend again.”