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Reference Publications 0 Comments In These Girls Hope is a Muscle. - book reviews


 * The Progressive**, Jan 1995, by Ruth Conniff

Sports, sex, and hope were the themes of my reading this year. As both an athlete and a coach of high-school girls, I was particularly excited about two new books on women and sports, In These Girls Hope is a Muscle, by Madeleine Blais (Atlantic Monthly Press), and The Stronger Women Get the More Men Love Football by Mariah Burton Nelson (Harcourt Brace). Both books discuss the power of sports--as a progressive, transformative force for girls in Blais's book, and as a regressive symbol of male supremacy in Nelson's.

In These Girls Hope is a Muscle is the story of the Lady Hurricanes--the high-school girls' basketball team from Amherst, Massachusetts, that captured the state title in 1993. I had been waiting to read the whole story ever since a very moving excerpt appeared in The New York Times Magazine last year.

Blais does a wonderful job of capturing the energy and life-or-death intensity of adolescence. The portraits of individual players reminded me of the girls I coach--boisterously struttion, with their boom box before a competition, dressing in team colors, with team hair bands, team dinners, and a panoply of other team rituals. They are also full of seriousness and focus, tenaciously, almost intinctively, hurling themselves at all obstacles: fear, pain, interteam rivalries, rigid social rules about femininity, and their own physical limits.

This is a story of sheer victory. Beginning on a low note, with the disappointing end of the 1992 season, Blais follows the determined evolution of the Hurricanes into state champions, and the changes that take place along the way in the players and the people around them.

There is something special, something pure, about girls' sports, Blais points out. Part of it is that the games are played for their own sake--there is no chance of fame or large salaries down the road. And part of it is that the girls understand and appreciate what a gift it is to be an athlete--something their mothers couldn't be.

"Just imagine what it must be like to go through puberty and have your body on your side," says one team mom. The pride the girls stir up in the community, which starts packing the gym for games, is one of the most touching things about the Hurricanes' story.

Little girls ask the team members for autographs, and the Hurricanes' success spawns new interest in a youth basketball program, where the players work with small children of both sexes, who regard them with awe. For the first time ever, the all-girl high-school cheerleading squad comes out to root for the girls' team.

"For some of the mothers of the Hurricanes, who remembered when to be a cheerleader was the only way to feel connected to a sport and physical beauty was the first criterion, the moment was a vindication. A circle had been closed. It was as if the Hurricanes colluding with the cheerleaders and the cheerleaders colluding with the Hurricanes were sending a message of reconciliation."

In typical teenage-girl fashion, many of the Hurricanes talk about, write about, and make speeches on the meaning of love and friendship to the team, and the "fire" they all feel. In one such outpouring, All-American Jamila Wideman (now a scholarship player for Stanford) describes the special sorority they've developed, and their chant, "Hoop Phi!": "Hoop Phi is the thing that people search for in their lives. It is the thing that we have found, to which we belong, contribute, and love. I am no longer searching for my 'Real Love'....what I have experienced in this winter season is unique and simply unrepeatable."

In some parts, Blais's detailed account bogs down--headlines and song titles are immortalized, year-book style, along with minutiae about the town, the weather, and minor characters in the plot. The whole book is worth reading for the last chapter, though. The climactic final game, and Blais's description of that fateful night, from the pre-game locker-room talk to the bus ride home, is beautiful. She evokes exactly the feeling of time crystallized on those rare, clear moments, especially in high school--"when truth itself had become a dream." I admit I had tears in my eyes.

Writing about sports is hard. Part of the problem is that sports stories, with their classic elements of struggle, persistence, and courage in the face of adversity, are hopelessly cliched. The sports pages are full of purple prose about familiar dramas. Of course, the lead characters are almost always male. Blais's story is particularly interesting because it's about a group of girls. Still, it is burdened at times by cliched sports writing (including the strained search for new words to convey such mundane concepts as making a basket). Also, the book is tinged in parts with a self-consciousness and sentimentality that seems attached to the female subjects. The breathless astonishment with which they are regarded by just about everyone, including the author, gets a little old.

I couldn't help but wonder what the story would be like if it took for granted the idea of female heroism, camaraderie, and athleticism--if it were written from a brash, straightforward, athlete's point of view. COPYRIGHT 1995 The Progressive, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group