State

Set against a backdrop of social change during the 1970s, State is an important, compelling, and entertaining first-person account of what it was like to live through both traditional gender discrimination in sports and the joy of the very first days of equality--or at least the closest that one high school girls' basketball team ever came to it.

In 1975, freshman Melissa Isaacson--along with the other girls who'd spent summers with their noses pressed against the fences of Little League ball fields, unable to play--entered Niles West High School in suburban Chicago with one goal: make a team, any team. For "Missy," that team turned out to be basketball.

Title IX had passed just three years earlier, prohibiting gender discrimination in education programs or activities, including athletics. As a result, states like Illinois began implementing varsity competition--and state tournaments--for girls' high school sports.

At the time, Missy and her teammates didn't really understand the legislation. All they knew was they finally had opportunities--to play, to learn, to sweat, to lose, to win--and an identity: They were athletes. They were a team.

And in 1979, they became state champions.

With the intimate insights of the girl who lived it, the pacing of a born storyteller, and the painstaking reporting of a veteran sports journalist, Isaacson chronicles one high school team's journey to the state championship. In doing so, Isaacson shows us how a group of "tomboy" misfits found themselves and each other, and how basketball rescued them from their collective frustrations and troubled homes, and forever altered the course of their lives.