DETROIT — Amy Probst, who wears business suits and pearls to work as a corporate trainer, laced up her roller skates, put in her mouth guard and adjusted her helmet. A self-described closet tomboy, she just wants to knock the stuffing out of somebody.

Probst, 43, of Ypsilanti, Mich., skated across the wooden floor at the Sumpter Roller Rink in Belleville, Mich., feeling like she was a kid again — the little girl who used to climb trees and ride bikes and come home with skinned knees before puberty hit and she started wearing tight jeans and makeup.

“Let’s go,” shouted Michelle Link, 35, the assistant coach of the Ann Arbor Derby Dimes, a new roller derby league that has pulled together about 50 women from across southeast Michigan, everyone from stay-at-home moms and former college athletes to fortysomething corporate professionals.

The Derby Dimes started in April as a grassroots movement and spread from friend to friend on Facebook. It has grown into a well-organized league with a 12-member board of directors. “We are trying hard to make it about sisterhood,” says Link, one of the few players with experience. “It’s important for everybody to get along. You leave it on the track.”

Link starts with the basics: “You have to learn that if your foot gets clipped by another skater, you don’t fall on your face.”

‘A tough, cool sport’

On one hot, sticky August morning, 31 women lined up in five rows doing drills.

There was Evelyn Krieger, 32, a former figure skater. “For me, at my point in life, it’s nice because you don’t have to be 5 feet tall and 95 pounds to do derby,” says Krieger, a high school English teacher who lives in Ann Arbor. “It’s so welcoming to people of all backgrounds and sizes. There is the competition and camaraderie. And it’s a little rock and roll, which is cool.”

There was Kristina Flaishans, 26, who’d gotten just four hours of sleep after waiting tables until closing time at an Ypsilanti bar. “It’s a sweet hobby,” says Flaishans, who lives in Ypsilanti. “It’s kind of bad-ass. It works you out as you have fun, and it’s a good excuse to get out of the house.”

And there was Cristin Colling, fit and trim, a 46-year-old exercise junkie from Belleville, forever in search of a new challenge. She has tried hiking and skiing and rock climbing and running and tennis. Roller derby sounded like the next logical step.

“I’ve always wanted to be in roller derby,” Colling says. “My grandmother used to talk about it. She and my grandfather would go and that was date night. It’s just cool that this has started.”

Leo Seltzer, a Chicago sports promoter, is credited with holding the first roller derby event—an endurance race — in 1935, according to the National Roller Derby Hall of Fame. Eventually, roller derby morphed into a sport that emphasized skater collisions and falls, with two teams scoring points by passing members of the opposing team.

The Derby Dimes is the only women’s banked-track roller derby league in Michigan. Other leagues, such as the Detroit Derby Girls and Grand Raggidy Roller Girls, compete on a flat track.

Kassandra Frost went to the first practice with one goal: She didn’t want to fall.

But, of course, she did.

“I landed on my tailbone,” says Frost, 28, of Manchester, Mich. “I think I’ve landed on it every practice and it’s a little tender, but it’s getting better. It gives you a chance to challenge yourself. I still can’t go backwards very fast. I haven’t always been a very athletic person, so this is me learning how to do that.”

Laura Jablonski also had some apprehension before joining, but she quickly fell for it. “This is the most bad-ass sport I’ve ever seen,” says Jablonski, 27, of Ann Arbor, Mich., who works for a company that distributes adult novelties.

Jablonski says she feels a sense of accomplishment, doing something so unusual: “I never really liked sports, but this appealed to me. It’s a tough, cool sport.”

The Derby Dimes practice three days a week, two hours at a time on an old-fashioned roller rink.

Members eventually want to raise $40,000 to build a banked track for competitions.

“We are all trying to build a league,” says Colling. “We want people to take this seriously. It’s a serious sport. If you aren’t trained right, if you aren’t involved or coming to practices, you aren’t going to know what’s going on.”

Building confidence

The Derby Dimes hope to hold scrimmages at the end of this year and have their first real competitions next summer.

Some members of the Ann Arbor Dimes are stay-at-home moms who just want a break from the kids and to get some exercise. Others are searching for camaraderie and friendship.

For Sarah Line, 22, roller derby is helping her manage a medical condition. She says she has obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, which manifests itself in a need to have an organized, scheduled life. She also says she has agoraphobia and is afraid to leave her house in Westland, Mich. So just attending practice is a major accomplishment.

“I always wake up really nervous,” Line says. “I don’t want to leave the house. I want to be here but it’s so hard to come. I do a mental pep talk. This is what I want. If I keep letting it stop me, I’m never going to do a single thing I want to do.”

After the first week of practice, she felt as if she had started to destroy a demon. “At the end, I couldn’t believe I did it. I think it’s a good way to get over my anxiety,” Line says.

Her life has begun to change, and she has made lots of new friends.

“I have a lot of people here who are encouraging me,” Line says. “A lot of times, if I get embarrassed, I won’t come back. If I get embarrassed in class, I dropped out of school. I started at Schoolcraft, and I dropped out. If I talked in front of people, if I stuttered, I couldn’t go back.”

But she doesn’t feel that way in roller derby.

“I don’t feel stupid,” Line says. “I haven’t felt judged. Last Sunday, I fell and I literally couldn’t get back up. I didn’t feel like anybody was staring at me. Nobody was saying, ‘Look at that girl!’ A lot of people are in the same boat that I am in.”

Probst is reluctant to admit that she’s pushing the older side of the team’s age spectrum.

“I’m an infiltrator of oldness,” she says. She works for Thomson Reuters with a cubicle in Ann Arbor, but she spends much of her time traveling the country. “Right now, I am teaching Medicare employees how to use a software and data mining software system to identify Medicare fraud,” she said, smiling, knowing how far removed that is from being a derby girl.

She says that in her office she is known as a “very sweet, bubbly girl. They would have no idea that I’m doing roller derby.”

Probst never participated in team sports but decided to try roller derby after attending her first bout. Each competition is called a “bout,” a boxing term, because a derby match is a fight to the end, according to the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association.

Probst attended a Detroit Derby Girls championship this summer at Cobo Arena.

“I was blown away by how much I loved the whole vibe of the people and event,” Probst says. “These are the girls I grew up with, the ones I climbed trees with.

“I’m so happy when I leave,” she says. “This is who I was until I hit puberty and had to change, when gender didn’t matter and you could just play.”

Roller derby 101

Here’s how it works: Two teams of four blockers skate around an elliptical track while a scorer, called the jammer, tries to fight her way through, gaining a point for each opposing player she passes.

Roller derby in Central Oregon

Lava City Roller Dolls

Contact: Kelly de Kramer at 541-598-4821 or Terese Thompsom at sshinemoon@gmail.com.

Renegade Roller Derby

Contact: Nikki Monroe at 541-350-1143 or www.renegadesor.com and click on the contact tab.