A fan applauds a growing genre of YA sports novels

As a fifth grader at Conlee Elementary School in Las Cruces, NM, in the 1960s, I was too young for real sports and too old for playground games. Little League Baseball offered opportunities for live athletic competition in the summer, but that was about it. And in the days before ESPN and 24-hour cable TV, kids like me, athletic but young, passionate about sports but unable to participate in them, had to find other ways to satisfy their sports appetites.

For me, the next best thing to playing sports was reading about them.

In the juvenile sports novels that I read in elementary school, I became the star player, the hero; the vicarious nature of fiction put me at the plate, the free-throw line, or the goal line of the story I was reading. Play-by-play action was the heart and soul of the sports novels I loved, so I didn't have to read about girlfriends, social issues, the state of the world, or other such boring stuff. The only motivation my fictional sports heroes needed was the desire to win. Of course, authors threw in enough obstacles and setbacks to make my hero's journey to the big game interesting, but I knew that by the final page, my hero would hammer the winning home run, score the last-second touchdown, or sink the clutch free throw in overtime.

Things changed when I was in junior high and high school and played football and basketball, ran track, and spent weekends watching college and professional athletes doing what I was doing, only better. I learned about a side of sports that hadn't existed in the novels of my youth, and my interest in those books faded because I recognized the stories for what they were: didactic fantasies set on the playing field. My experience had taught me that the hard facts of life rarely appeared in those books and that last-minute heroics rarely occurred in real games.

So I quit reading sports fiction and turned instead to books that suited my eclectic and more mature appetite: Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man, Joseph Heller's Catch 22, Paul Zimmerman's A Thinking Man's Guide to Pro Football, James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small, and whatever mystery novels and magazines happened to be lying around the house. By the time I was 17, I was certain that sports novels were a middle-grade genre. I still loved sports, but I didn't believe that there were any novels dealing with sports in the complex, realistic way that would interest me.

Unfortunately, I didn't know that sports novels for young adults were evolving from play-by-play game-stories into books that dealt realistically with the sporting world, and, more importantly, told about athletes whose lives–and stories–were influenced by something other than football, basketball, or baseball. A handful of these books, most notably some of John R. Tunis's novels, had been around for some time, but this new form of the YA sports novel was emerging during my high school years, concurrent with the rise of YA literature in general and the problem novel in particular.

This development in YA sports literature gained momentum in the 1980s as sports novels began to rely even less on sports-driven plots and more on social issues and character development. I call this new brand of YA sports novel a "sportlerroman," a form of the traditional bildungsroman apprenticeship novel that is a coming-of-age story of an athlete.

By combining two passions of 21st-century America–sports and youth–the sportlerroman integrates the angst of adolescence with the thrill of victory and agony of defeat. Refreshingly, these books aren't bound by the old march-to-the-big-game formula; the conflict may begin with a sports-related issue, but it soon works its way into other aspects of a character's life.

Of course, plenty of traditional sports novels are still being published, particularly as series or middle-grade books. Maureen Holohan's "The Broadway Ballplayers" (S & S), Dan Gutman's "Baseball Card Adventures" (HarperCollins) and Rich Wallace's "Winning Season" (Viking) are good examples of recent series. Rick Telander's String Music (Cricket, 2002) and Linda Zinnen's Holding at Third (Dutton, 2004) represent well the middle-grade sports novel. Robert Lipsyte's Warrior Angel (HarperCollins, 2003), John H. Ritter's The Boy Who Saved Baseball (Philomel, 2003), and Erik E. Esckilsen's Offsides (Houghton, 2004) are good examples of the modern YA sports novel. These books are better than the sports stories of my childhood, and they offer enough game scenes to satisfy readers who want play-by-play action.

David Guy's Football Dreams (Penguin, 1980) is an excellent example of how a sportlerroman differs from the basic sports novel. It is the story of Dan Keith, a senior offensive lineman at an exclusive private academy, whose ambivalence about football has plagued his entire high school career. He has the skills necessary to be successful, but he lacks the kind of commitment that would make him truly exceptional. Though his father insists that he doesn't expect Dan to play football, Dan remains on the team because he assumes that quitting would disappoint him. Dan's father dies before Dan completes high school and misses his son's singular moment of gridiron glory. Beautifully written, realistic sports scenes can be found throughout Football Dreams, but it's not a traditional sports novel; it's a sportlerroman because it's about a young athlete and his struggles to figure out his identity and his relationship with his father.

Jan Cheripko's Imitate the Tiger (Boyds Mills, 1996) is a sportlerroman about a teen who loves football and partying. Readers will quickly recognize the symptoms of Chris's spiral into alcoholism and dysfunction, but the protagonist does not, until he hits bottom and lands in a rehab center. Sports is only a small part of this realistic portrayal of teenage alcoholism and its effects on a young man.

Thomas Cochran's Roughnecks (Harcourt, 1997) is, in my opinion, the best novel about high school football ever written. Travis Cody is an overachieving player for the Oil Camp Roughnecks in Louisiana. Scenes–both on the gridiron and in the locker room–are vivid and authentic, but Roughnecks is a sportlerroman because it focuses on the mental and emotional state of an athlete as he prepares for the last and biggest game of his career.

Nina Revoyr's The Necessary Hunger (S & S, 1997) has received the most literary praise of any sports novel about female high school athletes. Though it was not marketed as a YA novel, the story has many of the characteristics common to the genre. It tells the story of Nancy Takahiro and her friend Raina Webber, a pair of high school basketball stars. The standard young adult plot elements, school events, peer relationships, conflicts with parents, and other teenage troubles occupy a good portion of this coming-of-age story. The narrative structure and the content, however, are more sophisticated than what readers might expect in a YA novel. This finely crafted story includes some superb basketball action along with sharp insights into adolescent female athletes.

John H. Ritter's Choosing Up Sides (Philomel, 1998) uses baseball as an element in the story of 13-year-old Luke Bledsoe, son of a fiery Prohibition-era itinerant preacher who believes that participating in sports is wicked idleness and that left-handedness is a mark of the devil. Luke discovers, innocently, a natural talent for pitching a baseball and longs to use his skill for personal fulfillment and as a way of making friends. His desire to play baseball and to use his left arm lead to a series of conflicts that force Luke to reconsider his relationship with his father and their church.

Chris Crutcher is the most successful author of sportlerroman, and his Whale Talk (Greenwillow, 2001) shows that he continues to be more interested in the lives and minds of young athletes than in their games. T. J. Jones, a mixed-race teen, has more athletic ability than most of his peers but he refuses to participate on school teams. During his senior year, he decides to antagonize the bigoted and oppressive sports establishment by organizing a group of rejects into the school's first swimming team. In the course of the novel, T. J. also tangles with a local racist, a man who abuses his five-year-old mixed-race stepdaughter, whom T. J. is determined to rescue. Crutcher's blend of athletic competition and tough contemporary issues results in a provocative coming-of-age story.

This ever-evolving kind of YA sports novel provides a depth previously absent from teen sports fiction, and promises to appeal to sophisticated adolescent readers who like sports but who also expect a novel to deliver a thoughtful, provocative read.