An ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults New Bonus Content: -Q&A with Walter Dean Myers -Q&A with screenwriter John Ballard -Teaser chapter from On a Clear Day -Excerpt from 145th Street All eyes are on seventeen-year-old Lonnie Jackson while he practices with his team for a city-wide basketball Tournament of Champions. His coach, Cal, knows Lonnie has what it takes to be a pro basketball player, but warns him about giving in to the pressure. Cal knows because he, too, once had the chance—but sold out. As the tournament nears, Lonnie learns that some heavy bettors want Cal to keep him on the bench so that the team will lose the championship. As the last seconds of the game tick away, Lonnie and Cal must make a decision. Are they willing to blow the chance of a lifetime?

The same year Bob Knight was coming to power at Indiana, a lesser known -- but no less mercurial -- coach was setting up shop 2,000 miles to the west. Dick Harter left a nationally prominent college basketball team at the University of Pennsylvania for a rebuilding job at Oregon and the expressed intention of challenging the sport's reigning power, UCLA. What evolved was a program that recruited nationally and didn't apologize for an extremely physical style that featured players diving on the floor for loose balls, battering the opposition under the boards and on occasion, overstepping the standards of fair play. The so-called "Kamikaze Kids" quickly became revered around their Eugene home base and reviled through much of the rest of the Pac-8 Conference. At a time when the league ranked at or near the top in the country competitively, several coaches were outspoken critics of the Ducks' tactics, including the sainted John Wooden of UCLA. This is the story of that fervent era, from the sizzling love affair between the program and the local fans to the contentiousness that swirled around Oregon and its furious approach to playing basketball.

The definitive, compulsively readable story of the greatest era of the most iconic league in college basketball history—the Big East “This book, full of long-standing rivalries, unmatched moments in the lives of coaches and players, and juicy insider gossip, is, like the game of basketball, a ton of fun.”—Philadelphia magazine The names need no introduction: Thompson and Patrick, Boeheim and the Pearl, and of course Gavitt. And the moments are part of college basketball lore: the Sweater Game, Villanova Beats Georgetown, and Six Overtimes. But this is the story of the Big East Conference that you haven’t heard before—of how the Northeast, once an afterthought, became the epicenter of college basketball. Before the league’s founding, East Coast basketball had crowned just three national champions in forty years, and none since 1954. But in the Big East’s first ten years, five of its teams played for a national championship. The league didn’t merely inherit good teams; it created them. But how did this unlikely group of schools come to dominate college basketball so quickly and completely? Including interviews with more than sixty of the key figures in the conference’s history, The Big East charts the league’s daring beginnings and its incredible rise. It transports fans inside packed arenas to epic wars fought between transcendent players, and behind locker-room doors where combustible coaches battled even more fiercely for a leg up. Started on a handshake and a prayer, the Big East carved an improbable arc in sports history, an ensemble of Catholic schools banding together to not only improve their own stations but rewrite the geographic boundaries of basketball. As former UConn coach Jim Calhoun eloquently put it, “It was Camelot. Camelot with bad language.”

By sharing the collective experiences of Latinas in Higher Education, this book provides a diverse range of empowering testimonios from Chingonas living on their own terms, who are defining professionalism for themselves. Chingona means "badass" and is a term that has been reappropriated by Latinas as an expression of empowerment both inside and outside of education. This anthology is a collection of twelve voices, representative of the experiences of empowered Chingonas across various roles in higher education who identify as Latinas. This volume shares the knowledge of Chingona Latina women, including their thoughts around authenticity, identity, and the disruption of dominant cultural experiences within the institution. It also seeks to help other Latinas realize that they are not alone in their experiences with higher education. This book includes questions for reflection and writing prompts, allowing readers to consider their own lived experiences and envision change. This collection will be important reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students in education-related programs, including Higher Education Studies and Educational Leadership, as well as courses in Ethnic Studies, Chicana/o/x Studies, Latinx/a/o Studies and Women’s Studies. It also offers an invaluable learning opportunity for higher education professionals, leaders, and administrators, especially within student affairs.

In his latest graphic novel, Dragon Hoops, New York Times bestselling author Gene Luen Yang turns the spotlight on his life, his family, and the high school where he teaches. Gene understands stories—comic book stories, in particular. Big action. Bigger thrills. And the hero always wins. But Gene doesn’t get sports. As a kid, his friends called him “Stick” and every basketball game he played ended in pain. He lost interest in basketball long ago, but at the high school where he now teaches, it's all anyone can talk about. The men’s varsity team, the Dragons, is having a phenomenal season that’s been decades in the making. Each victory brings them closer to their ultimate goal: the California State Championships. Once Gene gets to know these young all-stars, he realizes that their story is just as thrilling as anything he’s seen on a comic book page. He knows he has to follow this epic to its end. What he doesn’t know yet is that this season is not only going to change the Dragons’s lives, but his own life as well.

Critically acclaimed veteran sportswriter Frank Fitzpatrick takes readers courtside for one of the greatest upsets in college basketball history, the 1985 Villanova/Georgetown national championship showdown. A veteran Philadelphia Inquirer sportswriter and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Frank Fitzpatrick has long followed and covered Villanova basketball. In all that time, nothing compares with the Wildcats' legendary 1985 upset of Georgetown—a win so spectacular and unusually flawless that days after its conclusion, sports columnists were already calling it "The Perfect Game." The game, particularly its second half, was so different from what observers expected—so different, in fact, from what anyone had ever seen that a shroud of myth almost immediately began to envelop it. Over the years, the game took on mythological proportions with heroes and villains, but with a darker, more complex subtext. In the midst of the sunny Reagan Administration, the game had been played out amid darker themes—race, death, and, though no one knew it at the time, drugs. It was a night when the basketball world turned upside down. Villanova-Georgetown would be a perfect little microcosm of the 1980s. And it would be much more. Even now, a quarter-century later, the upset gives hope to sporting Davids everywhere. At the start of every NCAA Tournament, it is recalled as an exemplar of March's madness. Whenever sport's all-time upsets are ranked, it is high on those lists, along with hockey's Miracle on Ice. Now, through interviews with the players and coaches, through the work of sociologists and cultural critics, through the eyes of those who witnessed the game, Fitzpatrick brings to life the events of and surrounding that fateful night.

Angela "Big Ang" Raiola describes her life, and role on the television show, Mob wives.