The pack of girls skates around the track quickly. As one girl tries to pass another, the girl she's passing hits her hard with the side of her body, knocking her down to the polished concrete. She gets up and keeps skating. A few moments later, another girl rounds a curve and falls on her backside. She gets up, too.

As they finish the round, one girl wearing fishnet stockings looks at a fist-sized scrape on the back of her thigh and remarks casually, "That just ripped open the cut on my leg."

The girls belong to New Hampshire Roller Derby, the state's first roller derby league, which kicks off its inaugural season tomorrow. For the uninitiated, roller derby is an extreme sport requiring aggressive moves, roller skating skills and a tolerance for cuts, bruises and sprains.

The league's website warns, "If you play derby, you're going to get hurt. It's that simple."

The basic rules are as follows: Two teams of five compete against each other for points. A pack of four skaters from each team starts skating around a track. Seconds later, the remaining members of each team, called "jammers," start skating behind them. The jammers then need to skate through the pack (whose members are called "pivots" and "blockers"), then lap the pack, and start skating through again. For each of the opposing team's skaters that the jammer passes, she gets points. The members of the pack try to block the jammer from getting through.

Legal ways to block include hitting jammers with shoulders, hips, or the side of one's body, or skating in front of them while sticking one's rear end out.

"It's very physical and physically challenging," said Marnie MacFadyen, a client service manager from Manchester who is "slightly north of 40" and goes by the derby name Osteoferocious. "When you do drills, and take someone else out, it's a great way to show how strong and powerful you are."

MacFadyen, a lifelong athlete who is among the older members of the team, said the sport gave her self-confidence and a positive outlet to "burn off stress."

There are more than 40 girls (even older members call themselves girls) on the New Hampshire team, which was founded last July. Nicole Kimmick, a marketing manager whose derby friends know her as Hollywood Harlot, was one of the original team members. She said a few girls started skating together once a week in Kingsboro, Mass. Slowly, they spread the word, found more participants, started distributing flyers, talking to media and creating a business with a bank account and a name - Skate Free or Die Rollergirls. There were already teams in Boston, Providence, R.I., Maine and Vermont. "We're the middle link," Kimmick said.

The team practices together for nine hours a week. They volunteer in the community, participating in a breast cancer walk or helping with a bone marrow drive. The organization is skater-owned and run, so skaters fundraise and sell tickets to cover expenses like renting space and paying for emergency medical technicians to be on call during a bout.

Skaters range in age from early 20s to mid-40s and pick "derby names," which they use at practices. "There are gay women, married women, divorced women, women with children, women who survived diseases that should have killed them," said Rachel Chandler, 36, who skates under the name The Empress Explosiva.

Chandler, a director of homeless teen centers in Lowell, Mass., was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005. After reconstructive work and 12 surgeries, she said, she is skating on cement, showing off a "gym burn" on the top of her leg, and joking about her smelly gym bag. "I'm in the best condition I've been in in the last 10 years," she said.

Chandler said she loves the sisterhood of the group and the physical challenges that the sport demands. "Above and beyond it being a very bloody sport, it takes a lot of athleticism," she said.

Many of the women sport tattoos, piercings, and bright clothing. Some wear knee socks. Others don fishnet stockings. "I'm not 100 percent comfortable with myself in shorts, and fishnet looks that much hotter," said Marissa Buergin, 25, a.k.a. Raggedy Antics. "You get ring rash in the pattern of fishnet." Her friend added that blue bruises on her legs also have a cream-color fishnet pattern.

Buergin, a mother who works with brain and spinal cord injury patients, has spent her life snowboarding, riding horses and playing softball. She helped found the league when she was "going through a lot" in her life, and needed an outlet. "You get every bit of aggression out," she said. "If you're frustrated at work, you can't check them into the wall."

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