French love our Little Lynx French love our Little Lynx (February 07, 2003)

by Jeb Bing

I f you ever log onto the French Web site www.basquetebol.org, you'll find a link to the Little Lynx, a Pleasanton Youth Basketball team of first- and second-graders. That's right: This team of nine kids who aren't yet 5 feet tall has gained global notoriety thanks to Hans Ongchua, an enterprising father of one of the players, 7-year-old Samira, the tallest girl on the team and a second-grader at Mohr Elementary.

Ongchua started taking pictures at his daughter's games at Hart Middle School each Saturday, and then posting them on his family Web site at http://littlelynx.port5.com. Soon other parents were asking Hans and his wife Flora for more, so they moved their family photos to a password-protected site and posted photos of the games on the main one.

Hans Ongchua said the site became so popular with other families and kids that he started adding links and other extras, including team photos, training and practice schedules and even last month's pizza party schedule that closed the four-month season. One link was to the Minnesota Lynx, the Women's National Basketball Association's team in Minneapolis, which the Little Lynx team is named for. After that, realizing that he had the attention of at least 10 players and probably hundreds more from PYB's 100-team roster, Ongchua added "Homework Helpers," with online math skill builders, flashcards and "Writing with Writers" to promote school work while on the Web.

Today, a search of his site offers a potpourri of healthy "Just Us Girls" resources and women's basketball data and articles. There's even a site for "Grandparents Online," where they can buy gift dolls of Corey, Claire or Nini who are real teenage girls from around the world who engage in adventure sports like soccer, basketball, snowboarding, surfing, scuba diving and backpacking.

Ongchua, an analyst for a high tech manufacturer, admits that he's strictly low technology when it comes to photos. He still uses an old Olympus OM-2n SLR camera, with a 70-210mm lens set at its maximum aperture of f3.5, taking pictures without a flash so as not to distract the players. He takes his film to a one-hour processor and then scans the images into his home computer.

The site's new Guest Book includes messages from Pleasanton and other California viewers and increasing from Europe. Just this week, the "B-Ballers" from Geretsried and "Ann" from Kesselsdorf, both in Germany praised the Little Lynx for their playing stamina, along with Marek Szczepanowski, coach of the girl's basketball team in Gniezno, Poland, who invited the Lynx to a tournament there. Laurent Doche from Montpellier, in the south of France, was so impressed with Ongchua's coverage of girl's basketball in Pleasanton that he wrote a special report for his Web site - www.basquetebol.org - which covers basketball games throughout France and is adding Ongchua's as a link to his. Since then, European hits have climbed to 65 percent, so many, in fact, that Ongchua has added translations into Spanish, German and French. It's well worth a look, both for its content of basketball reports on the PYB team and other general interest, and a growing number of commentaries from basketball enthusiasts from abroad.