PORT ANGELES ­— The women are proud to be Port Scandalous: up from zero experience and coach-free.

And they are the real thing: a roller-derby team, just a year and a half old and gearing up for the next bout versus the Spokannibals from, you got it, Spokane, this Saturday night at the Olympic Skate Center.

“I used to skate here as a kid,” says Jessica Carvell, a founding member of Port Scandalous. Then, like a blond bobcat on wheels, she sweeps onto the rink for Monday-night practice.

Back in early 2010, Carvell hadn’t the foggiest idea what roller derby was — or what it has turned into. Then she and some friends went to a Rat City Rollergirls bout at KeyArena in Seattle. They were electrified.

Carvell and her posse, including Serena Staples and Holly Wickersham, said: “OK. Let’s do this.”

“This” is modern derby: jamming for the point, blocking, pivoting and hitting hard with the shoulders and the hips — all in booty shorts, fishnets

and such.

“The less you wear, the cooler you are,” says Carvell.

It’s fun to be feminine, after all, and it is especially fun to go for it on the flat track.

Not that Carvell and crew knew how to play at first. But friends from other derby teams in Western Washington — including Aimee “BrawlyAnna” Durgan, who grew up in Port Angeles and now lives in Port Orchard — came to help them train. And over the past 18 months, the players have gone to boot camps and bouts between teams across the region.

Carvell, whose full-time day job is in admissions at Olympic Medical Center, is officially treasurer and accounts-payable person for Port Scandalous.

On the rink, she’s Bloodspilla, a name she lifted from a computer game her husband, Tom, used to play. She is known, too, as “mother hen” to her teammates, one who knows what-all is going on with each.

Carvell proudly declares that she has a derby wife — sort of like a best buddy — in Heather “Milady Misery” Harris.

And OK, she also has a derby “girlfriend,” Kari “Cherry Pi” Bailey. They’re all part of the team’s stretchy-strong web of support.

“We’re for the skaters, by the skaters,” adds Carvell, 36. Sure, Port Scandalous has had coaches.

But they couldn’t devote enough time to the team.

The derby dolls are devoted: they hold three practices per week in addition to bouts every month.

Past opponents include Toxic 253 from Tacoma, the Oly Rollers from Olympia and the Whidbey Island Rollergirls.

So Port Scandalous, with 14 bouting players on the roster, has two captains, Wickersham, aka WickedSlam, and Molly “Stone Cold StunHer” Crabtree. Angie “Diva DerailHer” Wilhelm serves as team trainer — and with these three, that old coach thing is superfluous.

In addition, the team has six recent “fresh meat” graduates — relative newcomers — on its new B squad.

Oh, and there’s the junior team, which has in its ranks Maddelyn, Carvell’s 13-year-old daughter. Her eldest, 17-year-old Karli Carvell, is waiting to join “the big league,” as her mother says. And Olivia Carvell, 10, isn’t old enough for the junior team but brings her homework to the rink on practice nights.

“ So it’s a family sport,” Carvell says, adding that roller derby bears no resemblance to its 1970s counterpart: There’s no hair-pulling nor fighting, and the women check their workaday stresses at the door.

On derby nights, “you’re just skating,” says Carvell. That’s shorthand for the fact that on that track, you are a trained athlete, a strategist, part of a lean machine focused on scoring.

“It’s a total team thing. We rely on each other,” Carvell says, adding that the skaters come from various walks of life. Not everybody was an athlete before showing up at the rink; Carvell certainly wasn’t.

“I played soccer when I was 12,” she recalls. “That was it.”

Size doesn’t matter either, Carvell says. One look at these women, and it’s abundantly clear: Variety is the spice of Port Scandalous.

Now that she’s a mother, wife and full-time staffer at the hospital, Carvell well knows the art of time management. Her teammates are ever grappling with that issue, too.

It can be challenging to “meld with all of the estrogen running around,” she says, “until we get on the floor.” Then, she adds, everybody skates and the drama dissipates.

Staples, who had not skated for two and a half decades before she arrived at a Port Scandalous practice last year, has found a new kind of network here.

She might not have found these women friends “on the outside,” she says, “but now they are like my family.”

Staples, whose derby name is Scarlett O’TearYa, wants women to know: “No matter what your background, you would have a place here.”

Monday nights are for “fresh meat,” which means women age 18 and older can come check out the scene at Olympic Skate Center. If one decides to go for it, there are boot camps — in Seattle, Portland, even Kauai, Hawaii.

Then there is the junior league for 12- to 17-year-olds, on which Staples’ daughter Tyra, 14, skates.

“We train hard. Really hard, three nights a week,” adds Staples, whose day job is emergency room nurse at Olympic

Medical Center.

Port Scandalous has won its past five bouts; when they’re playing at home, it’s standing-room only for spectators. And these days, they’re working with someone who will never be able to join the team, but who is deep into derby.

Dylan Wickersham, 16, son of Wicked Slam, became a student of roller derby in summer 2010.

“When he gets interested in something, he studies and reads until he knows everything about it,” says his mom.

Dylan helps referee, puts together player lineups and leads the players through some intense calisthenics at practice.

They lift and lower their legs through a set of 20 repetitions, for example, while wearing their heavy skates.

Then, at the blow of the whistle, they leap to their feet and bolt for the opposite end of the rink, where they drop and do some more.

Dylan, of course, has an ironic nickname: Dilly Dally, “because he always makes us try to hurry up,” Wickersham says

with a grin.

Carvell adds that each new player decides how much extra boot-camp training time she wants to put in along with the Olympic Skate Center practices.

“They set their own boundaries, and we welcome them,” she says.

But once they learn to skate like this, “they’re usually hooked.”