In the Margins Book Award Winner

Shawn Harrington returned to Marshall High School as an assistant coach years after appearing as a player in the iconic basketball documentary film Hoop Dreams. In January of 2014, Marshall's struggling team was about to improve after the addition of a charismatic but troubled player. Everything changed, however, when two young men opened fire on Harrington's car as he drove his daughter to school. Using his body to shield her, Harrington was struck and paralyzed.

The mistaken-identity shooting was followed by a series of events that had a devastating impact on Harrington and Marshall's basketball family. Over the next three years, as a shocking number of players were murdered, it became obvious that the dream of the game providing a better life had nearly dissolved.

All the Dreams We've Dreamed is a true story of courage, endurance, and friendship in one of America's most violent neighborhoods. Author Rus Bradburd, who has an intimate forty-year relationship to Chicago basketball, tells Shawn's story with empathy and care, exploring the intertwined tragedies of gun violence, health care failure, racial assumptions, struggling educational systems, corruption in athletics--and the hope that can survive them all.

The inspiring true story of the tragic loss and triumphant resurrection of a basketball team and its coach at the heart of a small Indiana town.

By 1977 the University of Evansville's Purple Aces basketball team had won five small-college national championships. With a charismatic young coach and a freshman phenom, this small Indiana city hoped to see its team shine in the national spotlight. Then, on a foggy night, after just four games, the plane carrying the team and its coach crashed after takeoff, killing everyone on board.

The tragedy seemed insurmountable, a devastating blow to the identity of a fading factory town. But, with the support of a city in mourning, ambitious new coach Dick Walters promised to rebuild the cherished institution. Assembling a team of castoffs, walk-ons, and overachievers, Walters restored the legacy of the team and its fans. Against all odds, his young men made history.

A tribute to those who were lost, and to those who carried on, We Will Rise is the rich and powerful story of an underdog team and its fans and the spirit of a resilient community.

In this poignant memoir, a legendary sports journalist writes about the team that changed his life: the Morton High School Lady Potters basketball team.

Dave Kindred has covered dozens of Super Bowls and written about stars like Muhammad Ali, Tiger Woods, and Michael Jordan. But a high-school girls basketball team--the Lady Potters of Morton, Illinois--stands apart from the rest.

In this moving and intimate story, Kindred writes about his rise to professional success and the changes that brought him back to his hometown late in life. As he dealt with personal hardship, his urge to write sustained him. For years, he has recapped the games of the Lady Potters, including their many runs to state championships. He attended game after game, sitting in the stands and making notes, paid nothing but Milk Duds. And the team and their community were there for him as he lost a grandson to addiction and his wife to long-term illness. 

Tender and honest, Kindred's story reminds readers what sports are really about. He trades in the exhausting spectacle of Super Bowl Sunday for the joy of togetherness, the fire of competition, and the inexhaustible hope for victory tomorrow.

Thirty years ago after changing the sports book landscape with his mega-hit, A Season on the Brink, #1 New York Times bestselling author John Feinstein returns to his first love--college basketball--with a fascinating and compelling journey through a landscape of unsung, unpublicized and often unknown heroes of Division-1 college hoops.

John Feinstein has already taken readers into the inner circles of top college basketball programs in The Legends Club. This time, Feinstein pulls back the curtain on college basketball's lesser-known Cinderella stories--the smaller programs who no one expects to win, who have no chance of attracting the most coveted high school recruits, who rarely send their players on to the NBA.
Feinstein follows a handful of players, coaches, and schools who dream, not of winning the NCAA tournament, but of making it past their first or second round games. Every once in a while, one of these coaches or players is plucked from obscurity to continue on to lead a major team or to play professionally, cementing their status in these fiercely passionate fan bases as a legend. These are the gifted players who aren't handled with kid gloves--they're hardworking, gritty teammates who practice and party with everyone else.
With his trademark humor and invaluable connections, John Feinstein reveals the big time programs you've never heard of, the bracket busters you didn't expect to cheer for, and the coaches who inspire them to take their teams to the next level.

"A thrilling, cinematic story. I loved every minute I spent with these bold, daring women whose remarkable journey is the stuff of American legend." --Karen Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy

The Boys in the Boat meets A League of Their Own in this true story of a Depression-era championship women's team.

In the early 1930s, during the worst drought and financial depression in American history, Sam Babb began to dream. Like so many others, this charismatic Midwestern basketball coach wanted a reason to have hope. Traveling from farm to farm near the tiny Oklahoma college where he coached, Babb recruited talented, hardworking young women and offered them a chance at a better life: a free college education in exchange for playing on his basketball team, the Cardinals. 

Despite their fears of leaving home and the sacrifices that their families would face, the women joined the team. And as Babb coached the Cardinals, something extraordinary happened. These remarkable athletes found a passion for the game and a heartfelt loyalty to one another and their coach--and they began to win.

Combining exhilarating sports writing and exceptional storytelling, Dust Bowl Girls takes readers on the Cardinals' intense, improbable journey all the way to an epic showdown with the prevailing national champions, helmed by the legendary Babe Didrikson. Lydia Reeder captures a moment in history when female athletes faced intense scrutiny from influential figures in politics, education, and medicine who denounced women's sports as unhealthy and unladylike. At a time when a struggling nation was hungry for inspiration, this unlikely group of trailblazers achieved much more than a championship season.

The riveting inside story of college basketball's fiercest rivalry among three coaching legends--University of North Carolina's Dean Smith, Duke's Mike Krzyzewski, and North Carolina State's Jim Valvano--by the king of college basketball writers, #1 New York Times bestseller John Feinstein

On March 18, 1980, the immensely powerful Duke basketball program announced the hiring of its new coach--the man who would resurrect the team, restore glory to Duke, and defeat the legendary Dean Smith, who coached down the road at UNC Chapel Hill and had turned UNC into a powerhouse. Duke's new man was Mike Krzyzewski. The only problem was, no one knew who Krzyzewski was, he had a so-so record in his short time as head coach of Army, and worst of all, no one could even pronounce his name. The announcement caused head scratches . . . if not immediate calls for his head . . . and on this note his career at Duke began.

The table was set nine days later, when on March 27, 1980, Jim Valvano was hired by North Carolina State to be their new head coach. The hiring didn't raise as many eyebrows, but with the exuberant Valvano on board, two new coaches were now in place to challenge Dean Smith--and the most sensational competitive decade in history was about to unfold.

In the skillful hands of John Feinstein, this extraordinary rivalry--and the men behind it--come to life in a unique, intimate way. The Legends Club is a sports book that captures an era in American sport and culture, documenting the inside view of a decade of absolutely incredible competition. Feinstein pulls back the curtain on the recruiting wars, the intensely personal competition that wasn't always friendly, the enormous pressure and national stakes, and the battle for the very soul of college basketball allegiance in a hot-bed area. Getting to the roots of the NCAA goliath that is followed religiously by millions of fans today, Feinstein uses his unprecedented access to all three coaches to paint a portrait only he could conjure. The Legends Club is destined to be one of Feinstein's biggest bestsellers.

The Black Fives is a groundbreaking, timely history of the largely unknown early days of Black basketball, bringing to life the trailblazing players, teams, and impresarios who made the game.

"For a game that has meant so much to the world, Claude Johnson somehow presents a definitive account for a part of basketball's history that for so long was kept away from us. Claude is a superhero storyteller, and this book is a bona fide superpower." --Justin Tinsley, author of It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him

From the introduction of the game of basketball to Black communities on a wide scale in 1904 to the racial integration of the NBA in 1950, dozens of African American teams were founded and flourished. This period, known as the Black Fives Era (teams at the time were often called "fives"), was a time of pioneering players and managers. They battled discrimination and marginalization and created culturally rich, socially meaningful events. But despite headline-making rivalries between big-city clubs, the savvy moves of innovative businessmen, and the undeniable talent of star players, this period is almost entirely unknown to basketball fans.

Historian Claude Johnson has made it his mission to change that. An advocate fiercely committed to our history, for more than two decades Johnson has conducted interviews, mined archives, collected artifacts, and helped to preserve this historically important African American experience that otherwise would have been lost, establishing The Black Fives Foundation. This essential book is the result of his work, a landmark narrative history that braids together the stories of these forgotten pioneers and rewrites our understanding of the story of basketball.

"Kansas was one of the first states to embrace the fledgling sport of basketball, and Powhattanƒƒ‚‚ƒ‚‚"ƒƒ‚‚ƒ‚‚€ƒƒ‚‚ƒ‚‚"a small town in northeastern Kansasƒƒ‚‚ƒ‚‚"ƒƒ‚‚ƒ‚‚€ƒƒ‚‚ƒ‚‚"was among the first to become a basketball town. Powhattan and its high school played an important role in the evolution of the sport and the emergence of the state of Kansas as the basketball powerhouse it is today.

Drawing from primary source documents from the early days of Powhattan's basketball program, Kansas Basketball traces the origins of the sport's popularity in Kansas from basketball inventor James Naismith's founding of the Kansas University basketball team to the legendary and influential coaching careers of Phog Allen, Tex Winter, Jack Gardner, and player-turned-coach and Powhattan native, Johnnie Corrigan.

This impressive curation of sports writing and historical images woven together by a man who lived it gives basketball fans of all ages an in-depth look at the origin of the sport and the birth of Kansas Basketball."

The powerful story of a college basketball team who carried an era's brightest hopes--racial harmony, social mobility, and the triumph of the underdog--but whose success was soon followed by a shocking downfall

"A masterpiece of American storytelling."--Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Devil in the Grove

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST SPORTS BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

The unlikeliest of champions, the 1949-50 City College Beavers were extraordinary by every measure. New York's City College was a tuition-free, merit-based college in Harlem known far more for its intellectual achievements and political radicalism than its athletic prowess. Only two years after Jackie Robinson broke the Major League Baseball color barrier--and at a time when the National Basketball Association was still segregated--every single member of the Beavers was either Jewish or African American. But during that remarkable season, under the guidance of the legendary former player Nat Holman, this unheralded group of city kids would stun the basketball world by becoming the only team in history to win the NIT and NCAA tournaments in the same year.

This team, though, proved to be extraordinary in another way: During the following season, all of the team's starting five were arrested by New York City detectives, charged with conspiring with gamblers to shave points. Almost overnight these beloved heroes turned into fallen idols. The story centers on two teammates and close friends, Eddie Roman and Floyd Layne, one white, one black, each caught up in the scandal, each searching for a path to personal redemption. Though banned from the NBA, Layne continued to devote himself to basketball, teaching the game to young people in his Bronx neighborhood and, ultimately, with Roman's help, finding another kind of triumph--one that no one could have anticipated.

Drawing on interviews with the surviving members of that championship team, Matthew Goodman has created an indelible portrait of an era of smoke-filled arenas and Borscht Belt hotels, when college basketball was far more popular than the professional game. It was a time when gangsters controlled illegal sports betting, the police were on their payroll, and everyone, it seemed, was getting rich--except for the young men who actually played the games.

Tautly paced and rich with period detail, The City Game tells a story both dramatic and poignant: of political corruption, duplicity in big-time college sports, and the deeper meaning of athletic success.

The moving story of a Navajo high school basketball team, its members struggling with the everyday challenges of high school, adolescence, and family, and the great and unique obstacles facing Native Americans living on reservations.

Deep in the heart of northern Arizona, in a small and isolated patch of the vast 17.5-million-acre Navajo reservation, sits Chinle High School. Here, basketball is passion, passed from grandparent to parent to child. Rez Ball is a sport for winters where dark and cold descend fast and there is little else to do but roam mesa tops, work, and wonder what the future holds. The town has 4,500 residents and the high school arena seats 7,000. Fans drive thirty, fifty, even eighty miles to see the fast-paced and highly competitive matchups that are more than just games to players and fans.

Celebrated Times journalist Michael Powell brings us a narrative of triumph and hardship, a moving story about a basketball team on a Navajo reservation that shows how important sports can be to youths in struggling communities, and the transcendent magic and painful realities that confront Native Americans living on reservations. This book details his season-long immersion in the team, town, and culture, in which there were exhilarating wins, crushing losses, and conversations on long bus rides across the desert about dreams of leaving home and the fear of the same.

The annual NCAA Basketball Tournament, which has become known as “March Madness” has emerged as a major sports event, matched only by the Super Bowl and the Olympics. In Madness, Mark Mehler and Charles Paikert tell the stories behind the ten most compelling and memorable championship games in tournament history, from North Carolina’s triple-overtime victory over Wilt Chamberlain’s Kansas Wildcats in 1957 to Duke’s heart stopping victory over underdog Butler in 2010. 
As a bonus, five more games that just missed the cut are also examined. Madness goes beyond the games to tell the the backstories of these classics, each entirely unique unto itself. For example, Jim Valvano taking his impossible dream of a national title and making it come true for the 1983 North Carolina State Wolfpack; Rollie Massimino turning spaghetti and clam sauce into inspiration for his underachieving 1985 Villanova team; and Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, breaking down in tears while taking a Broadway curtain call in front of a wildly-applauding audience who two hours earlier didn't know who these two guys were decades after their head-to-head matchup in 1979. 
Some of these stories also resonate far beyond the basketball court, including the 1966 triumph by the Texas Western Miners, which helped chisel away the college basketball color line and stamped their victory as "Glory Road." Over sixty years of college basketball history is brought to life in this must-have for all basketball fans.

A celebration of the iconic shoes and superstars who have defined the sport for decades, A History of Basketball in Fifteen Sneakers tells the story of hoops as only shoes can.

The ultimate book for both hoops fans and sneaker obsessives, A History of Basketball in Fifteen Sneakers is an exciting and fascinating look at the sport written with authority and experience by former Complex and SLAM magazine editor Russ Bengtson. From primeval Converse Chuck Taylor All Stars to baroque Reebok Pumps and myth-making Air Jordans to super-high-tech Nike Adapt BBs, each chapter breaks down how a specific sneaker defined an era of basketball, transformed the culture, or changed the game. With full-color sneaker photographs and detailed illustrations throughout, the book is a kaleidoscopic celebration of the players, styles, and iconic moments that have shaped hoops both on and off the court.

Topics include: Walt Frazier's PUMA Clydes and the New York City street game; Michael Jordan's first signature Air Jordan and the birth of the modern global basketball superstar; Nike Air Swoopes and the evolution of the women's game; sneaker tech and the rise of retro; and much more.

Wars ravage Iraq and Afghanistan. An earthquake devastates Haiti. The economy is in crisis and America is in the death grip of partisan politics. But what really, really gets you down? Your college basketball team loses a key game. It kind of makes a person wonder—first, of course, about his priorities, but then, inevitably, about the nature of such an obsession, one clearly shared with millions of sports fans spanning the United States. In a book that begins with one fan’s passion for a game, Andrew Malan Milward takes a deep dive into sports culture, team loyalty, and a shared sense of belonging—and what these have to do with character, home, and history.

At the University of Kansas—where the inventor of the sport coached its first team—basketball is a religion, and Milward is a devoted follower with a faith that has grown despite time and distance. Jayhawker, his first venture into nonfiction, bears the marks of the accomplished storyteller. Sharply observed, deftly written, and often as dramatic as its subject, the book pairs personal memoir with cultural history to conduct us from the world of the athlete to the literary life, from competition to camaraderie, from the history of the game to the game as a reflection of American history at its darkest hour and in its shining moments. A journey through one man’s obsession with basketball, Jayhawker: On History, Home, and Basketball tells a quintessential American story.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Inspired by a major ESPN film series, this is an extraordinary oral history of basketball—its eye-opening untold history, its profound deeper meaning, its transformative influence on the world—as told through an unprecedented series of candid conversations with the game’s ultimate icons.
 
This is the greatest love story never told. It has passion and heartbreak, triumph and betrayal. It is deeply intimate yet crosses oceans, upends lives and changes nations. This is the true story of basketball.
 
It is the story of a Canadian invention that took over America, and the world. Of a supposed “white man’s sport” that became a way for people of color, women, and immigrants to claim a new place in society. Of a game that demands everything of those who love it, yet gives so much back in return. 
 
To tell this story, acclaimed journalists Jackie MacMullan, Rafe Bartholomew and Dan Klores embarked on a groundbreaking mission to interview a staggering lineup of basketball trailblazers. For the first time hundreds of legends, from Kobe, Lebron and Steph Curry to Magic Johnson, Dr. J and Jerry West, spoke movingly about their greatest passion. Former NBA commissioner David Stern and iconic coaches like Phil Jackson and Coach K opened up like never before. Those who shattered glass ceilings, from Bill Russell and Yao Ming to Cheryl Miller and Lisa Leslie, explained what it really took to lay claim to their place in the game.
 
At once a definitive oral history and something far more revelatory and life affirming, Basketball: A Love Story is the defining untold oral history of how basketball came to be, and what it means to those who love it.

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “powerful” (The Guardian) reflection on basketball, life, and home—from the author of the National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America

“Mesmerizing . . . not only the most original sports book I’ve ever read but one of the most moving books I’ve ever read, period.”—Steve James, director of Hoop Dreams

ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Vulture, Chicago Public Library, BookPage

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, The Washington Post, NPR, The Boston Globe, The New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Book Riot, Electric Lit

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD

Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1990s, Hanif Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron James were forged and countless others weren’t. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tension between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with intimate, personal storytelling. “Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father’s jump shot,” Abdurraqib writes. “The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time.”

There’s Always This Year is a triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. No matter the subject of his keen focus—whether it’s basketball, or music, or performance—Hanif Abdurraqib’s exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.

LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION