Children’s / Teenage Fiction: Sporting Stories

When eleven-year-old Baxter Brooks wakes up one morning with a sweet beard, he's pumped. How many fifth graders get to sport cheek mittens in math class? It's pretty much the greatest day of his life. What he first assumes is insta-puberty, escalates . . . rapidly. He grows fangs, people scream,...

Drew Lawson is all about basketball. Everyone in his life knows that his game is taking him places. (It has to, because his grades certainly won’t.) Drew knows how hard it is to make it big, but even with the long odds, he is good enough to have a shot. But when Coach hands the ball to another...

Paul Fisher is eager to leave his rich-kid private school and get back to Tangerine Middle, where he’d found acceptance as the goalkeeper of the War Eagles, the toughest soccer team in the county. First, though, he must survive the summer at home, where lightning strikes spark underground fires that...

Zeno Dubois might be young, but he has a remarkable ability. He’s a quarterback with a “rocket arm”—he’s able to throw a football for incredible distances. His dad wants Zeno to succeed, no matter what, so when a coach comes to recruit Zeno to an athletic boarding school, his dad immediately signs...

Nate plays soccer, but he doesn’t love it. He plays because it’s what his family expects. Then Lucas Cawley moves in across the street. Lucas isn’t like any of Nate’s sports friends—he’s poor, his parents are mostly absent, and he’s devoted to his sister, Megan, who has a learning disability....

Tom is ready to take the training wheels off his bicycle, but his friends aren't so sure. How will he convince them that his next stop is the Tour de France?! Tom won't let a few mishaps keep him from becoming the cyclist he knows he was born to be; that's what bandages are for. But his friends...