Summer reading for women’s sports fans
From Hawkeye basketball to ‘A League of Their Own,’ recent releases touch on a variety of topics
So you have some surgery and you’re basically on the bench for four to six weeks. Besides doing all the stuff your doctor tells you to do, what else do you do besides nap and watch the Nadiya season of “The Great British Baking Show” yet again?
Read, of course.
Fortunately, summer is a great time for it. And equally as fortunate, there has been a recent run of excellent books that feature female athletes or topics of interest to those who follow women’s sports. It’s nice to see, especially since in popular culture it’s getting more and more common to just have a documentary (often produced by the athletes themselves).
Sometimes, though, you just want to scrunch up with a good book, especially in the summer. Here’s an assortment of books that have come out in 2024 (and a couple from late 2023) that center female athletic stories.
Students produce a beauty
There has been no shortage of words written and photos taken of Caitlin Clark and the Iowa women’s basketball team in the past two seasons. But it would be hard to top More Than a Moment, a 240-page collection of original content created by student journalists at The Daily Iowan. University of Iowa students hustled; the book includes essays from tennis legend Billie Jean King and ESPN’s Holly Rowe, among others, as well as photos from games, practices and behind-the-scenes moments. More Than a Moment can be ordered online.
Another book, Unmatched, collects stories and photos celebrating Clark, including Des Moines Register and Iowa City Press-Citizen stories and photos that date back to her high school days at Dowling Catholic in West Des Moines. Unmatched can also be ordered online.
Digging into the science of female athletes
As much as the powers that be tried to make it not so over the years, women have long been athletic. Yet until recently, researchers have mostly treated female athletes as little more than smaller men as opposed to people who have distinctly different hormonal phases of their lives. (Think about it, the sports bra wasn’t invented until 1977, but presumably women bounced before that.)
Author Christine Yu details those research shortcomings in the fascinating Up to Speed: The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes. At times infuriating, the book offers keen insights into how recognizing those differences and life phases can impact not just performance but marketing. (So hey, Nike, thanks for making super comfy women’s basketball shorts that hit in just the right places.)
Another book that touches on the same territory just came out two weeks ago. Beyond the science of women’s bodies, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women by Maggie Mertens also delves into the century-plus history of women running competitively — or trying to.
Track and field trailblazers
Trivia: Who was the first woman to win a race at the Drake Relays? That would be Wilma Rudolph, a year after she won a 100-meter gold medal in Rome in 1960. Rudolph was just the brightest star, though, among the legendary Tigerbelles from Tennessee State. The story of the pioneering track team (and HBCU) from Nashville and its Olympic dominance is told in The Tigerbelles: Olympic Legends from Tennessee State. They broke barriers, they broke records and they won. A lot. At the 1960 Games alone, Tigerbelle runners won 23 medals. Not bad at any time, much less in pre-Title IX America.
Life stories
Basketball star Brittney Griner was imprisoned in Russia for nearly 10 months in 2022. She was detained on drug charges after mistakenly packing under 1 gram of medically prescribed cannabis oil that was found at a security checkpoint while returning to the country to play for her professional team there.
Griner, also a member of the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury and an Olympian, tells her story in Coming Home. It’s a moving and frightening memoir of the time period from waking up in a hurry to catch her flight to Moscow until her release in a prisoner swap. She writes frankly about the mistake that landed her in that precarious position, but also the love that sustained her throughout.
Just in time for the Olympics, swimmer Katie Ledecky has released a memoir, Just Add Water: My Swimming Life. The seven-time gold medalist and soon-to-be four-time Olympian has dominated her sport since making a splash (sorry, too easy) as a 15-year-old at the 2012 Games in London. Whatever happens in Paris, Ledecky has already earned a place as not just one of the greatest female swimmers in U.S. history, but one of the greatest swimmers, period.
As Wimbledon looms, tennis will take the spotlight. Back on the court after a maternity break will be the enigmatic Naomi Osaka, who will be looking for her first title in the sport’s iconic tournament. Ben Rothenberg, former tennis writer for the New York Times, interviewed Osaka, her family and her coaches to get to the heart of her somewhat unorthodox rise to success with Naomi Osaka: Her Journey to Finding Her Power and Her Voice.
I’m particularly eager to read Melissa Ludtke’s Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside, which comes out in August. As a 26-year-old reporter for Sports Illustrated in the 1970s, Ludtke was denied access to Major League Baseball’s locker rooms while male reporters were allowed in. She and her employer sued then-Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and MLB in 1978 and won, clearing the way for generations of future female sports journalists.
History to the north
Iowans have a way of (rightly) thinking that women’s basketball history can belong to them. Yet for decades around the country there were girls and women in other places that loved it just as much and worked to get their own opportunities.
Howard Megdal, founder and editor of the must-subscribe women’s sports newsletters and websites The IX and The Next, tells that lesser-known history in Rare Gems: How Four Generations of Women Helped Pave the Way for the WNBA. Megdal homes in on Minnesota, starting with a barnstorming pioneer and continuing to Hall of Famer Lindsay Whalen, the four-time WNBA champs Minnesota Lynx and a look ahead to the next generation with UConn’s Paige Bueckers of suburban Minneapolis.
Why bring it up here besides talking up our neighbors to the north? Megdal is currently working on a book about Iowa, so the Hawkeye State will get its due.
Celebrating a contemporary classic
Finally, how about a little movie magic? It really was no trick for “A League of Their Own” to become a success, it just took a little faith on the part of director Penny Marshall and a whole lot of arm-twisting among Hollywood executives that a story about women baseball players might be a good idea.
No Crying in Baseball is a fun romp through the now-classic 1992 film that few thought would be such a big deal. It’s a delight to read about what could have been: Jim Belushi instead of Tom Hanks? Debra Winger instead of Geena Davis?
Because everything has an Iowa connection somewhere, Lori Petty, who played tempestuous younger sister Kit, graduated from Sioux City North but was in neither softball nor theater. And former Des Moines Lincoln softball player Brenda Ferrari, a comic who performs as Etta May, had a small role as a catcher for the Rockford Peaches’ arch rival, the Racine Belles. (I wrote about Ferrari when the film came out — “My mom made me call you,” she told me at the time — and the Register dug that out in 2018 when Marshall died.)
Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”
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