APEX - When his high school peers in Cary were playing football and basketball, Tyler Perez was enduring the taunts and snickers that are unavoidable with the sport he chose: jump rope.

That's not a misprint. Jumping rope, usually thought of as a girly playground game, has evolved into a sport you can watch on ESPN: gravity-defying feats of agility that resemble gymnastics performed with a high-performance lasso.

Though only about a quarter-century old, competitive rope skipping has developed a distinct sports culture, with its own tournament circuit, celebrity athletes, private trainers and drug testing before international tournaments. And the Triangle has emerged as one of the world's hubs for rope-skipping talent, with four world-class clubs.

Perez, a 20-year-old jump rope athlete who has trained since age 13, competed Saturday at Apex High School in the Amateur Athletic Union Jump Rope District Championship. The N.C. State University junior was one of about 140 rope skippers ages 7 to 22 from North Carolina and Virginia, all vying for slots in the Junior Olympics finals this summer.

"If this sport were an Olympic sport," Perez said, "I would generously venture to say there are four to five people here today who would qualify to compete in the Olympics."

The term "jump" is a misnomer, for the sport involves every conceivable variation on the theme: flips, cartwheels, splits, handstands, rolls, twists, cancan dance moves and Cossack-style squat-stepping. At the advanced stage, the rope skippers release the rope at one end, never missing a beat while the rope circles the air and magically springs back into their clutch. All the while, the athletes are expected to smile calmly at the judges, one of the polite conventions of the sport.

As a teenager, Perez would silence doubters with the humble tool of his trade: a $2 jump rope whirring in a 180 mph blur. Today he is considered one of the top names in the sport. He made a cameo appearance in "Jump In!" -- this year's Disney Channel movie about the the jump rope craze and has traveled the world as a member of the USA Jump Rope All Star Team, the sport's equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters.

As the competition level intensifies, rope skipping is following a familiar pattern established in other sports. It's not unheard of for kids to get up at 5 a.m. to train. Parents hire private coaches to give their budding champions an edge. But the sport hasn't yet evolved to the adrenal stage where parents try to disqualify judges and threaten other kids, said Marley Braun, a Cary resident whose 11-year-old daughter competed Saturday.

Rope-skipping competitions grade athletes on speed, power and freestyle routines. The athletes perform solo and in double-dutch partnerships. They play for only about a minute, but that can be enough time to make 320 steps.

The routines are so complex and lightning-quick that the top score -- a 10 -- is more elusive than a hole-in-one in golf.

"I don't think I've ever seen one," said Anna Schimmelfing, 21, a competitor from Chapel Hill. "I would say it's near impossible."

Schimmelfing, a graduate of Elon University and a substitute elementary school teacher, is another of the world's rope skipping stars. Like Perez, she is also coaching the next generation of competitive rope skippers.

Although this is a young sport, there are leagues for adults and seniors. But already, the sport's range of possibilities has developed beyond any one jumper's physical ability.

"No one can do every trick there is," Schimmelfing said.