If you’re from Greenville, the Polish section of town, and into sports, at Franklin High you
go out for wrestling. Basketball? Yeah, the school has a team, but it’s strictly for black kids.
You and your friends wrestle.
Ray Wisniewski didn’t plan on anything else until he joined an athletic league basketball
team to help out his uncle and got hooked—the constant motion, the excitement, the butterflies
when you put up a shot, and that beautiful little piff! and kick of the net when you hit it. He
couldn't get enough, playing wherever and whenever he could.
He’s got game—Ray’s handle isn't great, but his defense is really good, his shot solid,
he’s got a good hoops IQ and can accept playing a role. That and the entirely different way the
white coach treats the black kids makes it pretty clear that his getting cut each year during
varsity tryouts is about bias, not skill. Especially when things change and he finally makes the
team.
Ray’s ecstatic to be playing and cool with some of the black kids, now that he’s gotten to
know them, but the more he mingles with "not our kind" the more prejudice and bias he finds around
him, including pretty close to home. Complicating things is the change in how others seem to view
him. He’s no longer just another Polish neighborhood kid and he's going to have to make some choices.
This is a solid book with some important messages, but it’s also a good read. Basketball is a
game defined by rhythm and flow, and Krech echoes that nicely in his writing, with on-court action
in short, staccato sentences, like a quick pass fast break, and other sequences as smoothly flowing
as the sweet curve of a gently arcing three pointer. Piff! The banter and attitudes of male
adolescents run fairly true, but Ray’s viewpoint voice comes across as a bit young for the high
school senior he’s supposed to be for most of the book, especially in light of how mature he is
about things such as his own behavior. Maybe dated more than young, where high school kids 20 years
ago would sound more like junior high kids today.
There’s still a lot to like here. The basketball is solid enough to entice a reluctant reader
who’s a fan of the game. There are clear good guys and bad guys on both sides of the race line.
The bad ones may be bad in stereotypical ways, another quibble, but there’s still a clear message
that it’s about the person not the skin color, and an equally clear one that circumstances aren't
sufficient excuse. It’s not all black and white, either—even the good guys like Ray aren't
perfectly good, again echoing real life. There’s a great message in the way the new coach handles
Ray’s mutual difficulties with one of the black kids, based in constructive solutions, not just
being goody two shoes (another message in the book addresses goody two shoes approaches, which
effectively just swap biases rather than solve things). A message the book as a whole tries to
offer, while telling a good story highlighted with some really nice basketball writing.
Recommended.