THE NETWORK OF NETBALL.

Byline: TOM HOFFARTH

GLENDALE - If you look hard enough, there's tangible evidence that Sharon Fluxman's preaching the gospel of netball is starting to net some important results.

The Thousand Oaks mother of two, a South Africa native who grew up playing this girly schoolyard sport that looks like primitive basketball without backboards, takes her self-appointed role both seriously and with plenty of playful enthusiasm and affection.

A driving force behind introducing what's ironically an American-invented sport to her neighborhood and beyond, one that's as common as footie and cricket in countries such as England, Australia and New Zealand, Fluxman's message to those curiosity seekers is simple: There's nothing but netball.

``Anyone who knows me knows I'm just crazy about my sport,'' said the founder of the California Netball Association, which includes the Thousand Oaks Comets and Los Angeles (formerly Santa Monica) Waves as its Southern California presence. ``I'll be playing until I'm 90, and then they only be able to scrape me off in bits and pieces.''

The quick explanation of what's going on here: Think basketball without dribbling, precision point-to-point passing and catching, two designated shooters per seven-player team allowed to put up shots nearly unguarded within a nine-foot arc, one point per basket and no real limits on shapes, sizes, skills or ages of the participants.

At Saturday's G'Day Netball Tournament at the Glendale YMCA, a satellite event of a national tournament going on in Australia, the two local clubs plus ones from San Francisco and San Diego had players in their mid-teens to mid-40s showing the technical ballet-like teamwork needed to get the ball (more like a volleyball) to the shooters parked under the 10-foot-high rims.

In some ways, it's counter-intuitive to a traditional game of hoops. In other ways, it's about as spot-on to the activity that James Naismith dreamed up more than 100 years ago. < ``In my CliffsNotes version, I describe it as a combination of basketball and Ultimate Frisbee,'' says Thousand Oaks' Angie Deem, who played soccer and tennis in high school, graduated from Pepperdine and works as a manager at an accounting and analyst firm. ``It's also a lot like chess, where each player has limited real estate. Your team is only as strong as your weakest player.

``It's an addictive sport. Once you pick it up, you can't put it down.''

The ease with which one can pick up the game is evidenced by how Jessica Lunaris, a biochemist at Amgen in Thousand Oaks, became a member of the Comets. The 33-year-old who claims to have ``no athletic skills whatsoever'' was at Thousand Oaks' Oakbrook Park shooting baskets with her boyfriend. The Comets, practicing on a custom-built netball court nearby that Fluxman pestered city hall to have installed a few years ago, needed another player and asked her to join.

Just like that, Fluxman, who used to have to advertise for players by taking out ads in the PennySaver when she began her campaign in 1999, had two more American converts.

Her latest grassroots plan of attack is to have permanent courts built at local schools. One is going up at Westlake Hills Elementary, where her 9- and 10-year-old children go to school.

The Waves just got the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks to convert two tennis courts in Carson into a netball court for their new home base.

Fluxman's flexing her netball network of new friends is hardly over.

``Here I am, this person with a terrible foreign accent, why on earth would anyone want to listen to me?'' she wonders. ``No offense, but the attitude I seem to get a lot of the time is: Everything's already great in America, and if we don't have it, it must not be that good. But it's my passion. I think we'll convince these Americans how good it is.''

CAPTION(S):

5 photos, 3 boxes

Photo:

(1 -- 2) Sharon Fluxman, above, who started the first netball club in Thousand Oaks and heads the California Netball Association, referees a game at a tournament in Glendale on Saturday. Left, Nicole Robb of San Diego United steadies to shoot as Jennie Zarraonandia of the Thousand Oaks Comets defends.

Evan Yee/Staff Photographer

(3) DAVID BECKHAM

(4) DWAYNE JARRETT

(5) MARK McGWIRE

Box:

(1) sunday punch

(2) HOT ... LUKEWARM ... COLD FISH

(3) The Pop Quiz