DORIS HOPP IS A GO-GETTER. She has to be to keep up with her 9-year-old son Spencer. Spencer has spina bifida, but it hasn't crimped his style at all.

“He wants to do all these things,” says Hopp of Poway, Calif., noting that her son is “the first kid in the Poway Unified School District who can jump rope with crutches. How can I not be motivated with a kid like that?”

It was impossible — especially as Spencer got older and wanted to do some of the same things as his twin brother, Alexander, who does not have spina bifida. So, about a year ago, Hopp sought out a wheelchair sports team for her son. There wasn't one.

“There was nothing going on,” Hopp says. That wasn't good for Spencer, who was accustomed to participating in sports. Spencer, who wears leg braces — fancy ones with colors and patterns — and gets around on wrist crutches except on long outings when he uses a wheelchair, golfs, plays tennis and swims. And he wanted to play wheelchair basketball. Hopp contacted the Poway Youth Basketball League. It had a program for mentally challenged youngsters, but nothing for the physically disabled. The head of the program told Hopp that if she organized the teams, got the coaches and ran the show, it could come under the league's umbrella.

“I thought I had to get busy here and get something going in wheelchair sports,” Hopp says.

But finding disabled kids to participate was a challenge. Hopp sent fliers to school principals. She worked through an adaptive physical education department. She called all the surrounding cities. Five kids surfaced. But Hopp wasn't discouraged.

“I don't give up,” she says. “I just keep pestering people.”

It paid off. She went to the local newspaper to place an ad. A reporter there did a story instead. The local TV channel called. Finally, she had a roster of 17 youngsters ages 8 to 18.

She hit up the San Diego Express, a team of older athletes who play wheelchair sports, for coaches. Sports wheelchair manufacturer Colours by Permobil, which is based in Anaheim, Calif., brought seven chairs out when the TV crew was filming and offered to donate a few to the program once it was up and running.

In January, the teams — there are enough participants for two and they call themselves “Hot Wheels” — began playing each other on Sundays. Hopp has watched with delight as the youngsters have blossomed. Their self-esteem has risen — helped in part by the trophies each child received at the end of the season — and those who were shy and somewhat reclusive are more outgoing, she says.

Spencer loves it. He likes “going fast and shooting,” he says, adding, “I'm not so bored. We get to play and it's fun.”

Hopp has started wheelchair tennis and golf programs, too. She wants to add a swim team, maybe handcycling as well.

“I'm trying to keep it so that …there's always something going,” she says.

Her dreams are big. She envisions one day having 10 teams of wheelchair athletes. “I would love to be able … to build a facility — a gymnasium with maybe a track [for wheelchair sports],” she says. Those in wheelchair sports would have first dibs on use of the facility, she says, but everyone else could have access too.

She knows that's a huge, expensive dream.

But Hopp, who is good at mixing optimism, energy and elbow grease and making it into a happening thing, adds: “Anything is possible.”