Basketball Books

While sports is a part of life; too many it is life. They live, breathe and symbolically die with their favorite teams. In this book, Hanson is the new high school basketball coach at Grant. It is a school that won an Indiana State championship decades before, but since then has had only minimal success. Sid Hawkes is a student whose father was on that championship team and has never forgotten it and won't let anyone else forget it. He owns the lumberyard and a construction company, making him the largest employer in town and his opinion carries great weight.
Sid's father has always pressured Sid into playing basketball, forcing him to take over fifty practice shots each evening. Sid is a studious boy and would rather pursue his academic side rather than basketball. However, when Hanson sees how Sid can shoot, he convinces him to come out for basketball. As the practice season starts, many in the town, led by Sid's father, get up a petition to have Hanson fired. They are rejecting Hanson because he is emphasizing character and quality of play over winning.
Once they start playing and winning their games, the town begins to rally around Hanson and despite some additional problems, they move into the state tournament and continue winning. Sid's father and Hanson develop a grudging admiration for each other, at Hanson's request Sid's father begins scouting the opposition. Sid becomes a devoted supporter of Hanson and for the first time in his life stands up to his father. To his credit, Sid's father respects Sid for doing so and they start to develop a closer relationship. Unlike the conclusion of many other sports books, Grant does not win the state championship, but they all win so much more.
Like most of the best juvenile sports books, this one is more about life than it is about sports. It demonstrates that there is more to life than sports and how we function in all aspects of our lives is more important than winning the games. What we develop inside while playing will affect us all through the remainder of our lives and we should never sacrifice our integrity just to win a game.

I have been coaching younger children for 4 years, and I wanted to get some new drills that I could use during practices. This book has a really good outline of offense, defense, rebounding and practice drills. There are also some very good points at the begining of the book on how to deal with parents and other coaches, etc... Overall this book is very good to design a practice plan for coaches who are either new to coaching basketball, or are looking for additional or different drills to run.

Order process was easy, quick and delivered and on time.....I have never had a problem ordering on the Amazon website, whether it be a new purchase directly from Amazon or a used book from another retailer.

GREAT FOR RUNNING DRILLS. IF YOU HAVE THE SPEED YOUR WHOLE OFFENSE COULD BE GEARED TO THE PRIMARY AND SECONDARY FAST BREAK. IF YOU DON'T HAVE THE TEAM SPEED THIS BOOK IS STILL A USEFUL TOOL FOR ANY LEVEL OF PLAY.

This book is an excellent source of coaching information. It describes fundamental concepts on all positions as well as the skills that are needed to be successful. Additionally, it describes the correct way to hit, field, and throw - these descriptions are clear and helped me to remember what's important for a kid with little or no baseball experience needs to know.
The book details everything from grips, base running & run-down tactics, equipment selection, numerous drills, and key defensive tactics. The writing is easy to understand and complete enough so that someone with little experience will be able to teach baseball fundamentals. Lately I've found myself answering player and parent questions verbatim from this book.
I've read several other popular coaching youth baseball guides and this one is the most comprehensive and also the most useful. This is my second year of coaching Little League; I wish I had this last year, it would have helped me to make better coaching decisions as well as aided in the development of my players. This book is probably all someone needs as a coach for youth leagues.
This truly is a complete guide to coaching youth baseball!

Kayes handbook provides immediate hands-on advice on how to motivate kids, teach basketball, and reinforce faith. He believes hard and plays hard. Nice tool for coaches of all skill levels.

You can really tell McCarthy has experience in coaching the sport as well as a keen understanding of the needs of young athletes and their parents. I found this book to be instrumental in guiding my son as a parent not only through a better grasp of the sport's strategies and rules but also simple drills to increase his ability to handle the ball and play well. The plethora of player-model pictures to further help us "see" what good athletic positioning looks like, is just good direction on his part. Some of us learn by seeing! As a parent or coach, of course knowing more about the sport can only help build a child's skills which increases their motivation to be better at the sport and want to play more. However, McCarthy also brings in some aspects of the psychological desires of player and parents from his experiences and covers what works and what doesn't relative to the emotional aspects in order to even further guide us to love and respect the sport. A very well rounded book and worth the economical price!

My reason for getting this book was completely mercenary. I was hoping to get in on what I thought was a new and untapped area of trading card collectibles. But I quickly discovered on reading Bonner's very interesting and informative book that basketball card collecting is already an established hobby, in which I wasn't about to make some quick dollars off some kid holding a Michael Jordan rookie card he didn't know what to do with. (That card goes for, oh, $3,000.) But after those initial dreams were deflated, I settled in for a good read. Bonner has a style that makes even a cold subject such as "Price Guides" come off with a lively flair. What I especially liked about the book is that while he describes in detail the surprisingly long history of basketball card production (Murad Cigarette Company started it all in 1911), the reader simultaneously gets a narrative on the development of basketball itself in the U.S., and its key players through the years.

A comprehensive guide to collecting Michael Jordan memorabilia. Very well documented with hundreds of pictures to help identify the various items.

An indispensable guide for MJ collectors.

We all knew kids like Morgan Brenner back in school: you'd say, "Hey, let's make a skateboard!" and a year later a fully-restored '56 Chevy was sitting in the driveway.

The genesis of College Basketball's National Championships must have been something like that: Maybe the original goal was a compilation of NCAA title tournaments or somesuch. Four years and a thousand pages later, however, what Brenner ended up putting together was a definitive compendium of every tournament ever conducted by the eight national athletic associations, with every non-association tournament thrown in for good measure.

This volume is a college b-ball lover's dream. You can do your own color commentary if you have it at your elbow, as every sportscaster is sure to. Its thoroughness is dazzling: Brenner even took pains to resolve confusion involving school names - changes, mergers, common usages - and provided a cross-reference in an appendix ("If you're looking for School [a], try School [b]..."). You can also test your knowledge with "Tournament Trivia:" Which school was the first women's collegiate national champion? Which tournament participant had the fewest wins in a season?

It's a pricey tome at $98.50 (Amazon.com) but look at it this way: it effectively replaces a whole shelf of lesser reference works costing many times that. If you're a true lover of the game and its history, this is the one book you want to have.

By the way, the first women's collegiate national champion was West Chester in 1969, in the invitational IAIW (page 1,027). Fewest wins in a season? Bay Ridge Christian in 1997, with zip.