From: jpcairo
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1999 21:40:04 -0500

I guess I have to admit that I am one of those people whose knowledge of sports and interest in the technicalities involved comes almost entirely from the young adult fiction I read. Well, I did play on the softball team in eighth grade and I have been a swimmer, though nowhere near a Stotan (Chris Crutcher). But even though I am a Middle School teacher, and we do have team sports where I come from, I have to confess that the most exciting soccer game I have ever attended was in the town of Tangerine, Florida, (Tangerine, by Edward Bloor), and the best ever wrestling matches were the ones between Maisie Potter and her eighth grade male opponents in the same book in which I learned what a hammerlock was (Jerry Spinelli, There's a Girl in My Hammerlock). I was a triathlete beside Beau Brewster in the Ironman competition (Chris Crutcher, Ironman), and I have practiced basketball night after night under those spotlights on the lot with Jerome in The Moves Make the Man
(Bruce Brooks). So actually I do feel that I know what I'm talking about.
    All of this is by way of offering a slightly different perspective on the present discussion. I have been reading people's comments about the fact that real athletes don't read books about athletics because they prefer to engage in the sport in an active way. I would like to say that real NON-athletes DO read those books about athletics! This aspect of well-written sports fiction interests me. It can enable even non athletes like me to experience the plays, and all without tripping over our own feet.
    I try to encourage both athletic and non-athletic kids to get in the game and see what a sport is like for kids their age by reading what I consider some of the best sports fiction writing for YA's there is. My sport is storytelling, and I can really appreciate a good one when I hear it. I just itch to pass it on! (I've pitched some good ones to the kids I know, and I've struck out a few times, too.)
    Sports are so often an arena for kids in which they learn how to deal with some of the real issues of give and take among people in life. They are a place where kids can find their level, or what position they are best suited to play. I think it is important for young kids to get in the game. My way of encouraging them to do so (as their school librarian) is to get them to read these books, sometimes by way of demonstrating to the kids what participation is all about.
    Tangerine and Bat 6 (Virginia Euwer Wolff) are two of my personal favorites. I maintain that great stories like the ones I've mentioned
(and I can't begin to name them all or enough of the ones that have impressed me) attract kids because they are full of real people, real struggles, real competition and feelings about all of these. In the best fiction the sport is the all-important framework - the metaphor - for the larger conflicts and resolutions of life that young people yearn to know about and become engaged in.

Paula Cairo Media Center Information Services (K-8) Friends Select School (Pre-K) Philadelphia PA 19103 jpcairo at bellatlantic.net
Received on Sun 10 Jan 1999 08:40:04 PM CST