Beastly Basketball

Joe joins his school's basketball team, but finds that the players are disorganized and lacking in discipline--so he sets out to use the skills he has learned in kung fu to bring the other players together as a functioning team.

Jared Richards is great at baseball video games, but when he loses a bet to his best friend Jared is forced to tryout for his school's baseball team--and finds out that playing the game for real is very different from virtual reality.

Basketball superstar Kobe Bryant made news as one of the NBA's highest scorers and the youngest all-star player. Over his twenty-year career with the LA Lakers, he earned three MVP awards and five championships. A towering figure in business and charity work too, Bryant is a name not to be forgotten. Written in an engaging style, this biography focuses on Bryant's accomplishments on the basketball court and off it. Colorful photographs, interesting sidebars, and a quick-access fact sheet round out this look at the life of the man who has been called the greatest basketball player in history.

The Otters keep leaving their game on the practice field and losing their football games--so wide receiver Steve Michaels must overcome his own frustrations and help Aaron Corbin, his quarterback, get past his fears and play like the champion can be.

In 1905 Lawrence Peter Hollis went to Springfield, Massachusetts, before beginning his job as the secretary of the YMCA at Monaghan Mill in Greenville, South Carolina. While there, he met James Naismith, the inventor of basketball, and learned of the fledgling game. Armed with Dr. Naismith's rules of the game and a basketball he bought in New York, Hollis returned to the mill and changed the face of athletics in South Carolina. Lawrence Peter Hollis was one of the first to introduce basketball south of the Mason-Dixon line, and the game quickly gained popularity in the textile mill villages throughout South Carolina. In 1921 Hollis and others organized a tournament to determine the best mill team, and thus the southern Textile Basketball Tournament was born. Over the years, some of the south's top cage talent played in the tourney, including "Smokey" Barbare, Lucille Foster Thomas, Bert Hill, Earl Wooten, Billy Cunningham, Pete Maravich, Sue Vickers and Tree Rollins. Decade-by-decade, the history of one of the longest running basketball tournaments is provided, along with profiles of many prominent participants. Full rosters for all teams in all tournaments are given in the appendices, along with all-tournament selections and members of the Southern Textile Athletic Hall of Fame.

A vibrant, unconventional, highly opinionated guide to the triumphs, joys, struggles, and heartbreaks of the modern era of the game, for every obsessive basketball fan who loves to hate hot takes The Joy of Basketball celebrates the meteoric rise of basketball over the last quarter century by ignoring the bland, traditionalist binary of wins or losses. Instead, the book's focus is on everything else. Using text, charts, and illustrations that upend conventional jock wisdom, the book details the most incredible players in history, draft flops, long-limbed oddballs, superteams, the international talent wave, brawls, scandals, the rapid evolution of contemporary gameplay, coaching, fashion, crime, positional erosion, tragic tales, memes, and the sacred Kardashian Blessing. Bouncing between witty graphics and keen sociopolitical observations, The Joy of Basketball is a subversive sports manifesto camouflaged as a colorful reference book for your coffee table.

Thirteen-year-old Franco dreams of playing professional soccer, but the team in his new school is terrible, and nobody on the team, including the coach, seems to care--Franco has always been a pass-first, team-first player, but persuading this bunch ball-hogs to play the right way may be more than he can handle.

Trey's team thinks Griffin, their newest teammate, is a rat - and they want Trey to set a trap to see where his loyalties lie.