Podium Finish Blog Tour

Why I Write About Sports

As a writer, you are your own first reader. You have to write a book you’d want to read. Otherwise, let’s be honest, your heart won’t be in it. Write for yourself, first and foremost. This is all wonderful advice that I’ve read countless authors give in some way, shape, or form in various online interviews, and it’s also advice I followed as a young writer without even realizing I was doing it.

My narrators have always had a sporty side, and, as far as I can remember anyway, have also been female. That’s not meant to be any kind of statement on authors writing in the point of view of the opposite gender, but rather an acknowledgment of my own preference. So why do I write about sports? The short answer is I’m 23 years old, and when I was a preteen/teen, there weren’t many books out that that were sports-centric and geared toward girls. Conversely, it seemed like a large portion of the “boy books” had a sports theme or focus. I remember scouring the shelves of my local library and coming across a book about a young male baseball player and thinking “So where’s the softball version?” Now, if I could go back in time, I’d tell myself to read the book anyway, that I’d probably like it, but instead I couldn’t find any sporty “girl books” and left the library empty-handed.

As a child, I played basketball, softball, volleyball, and soccer. I also ice skated, swam, did gymnastics, and rode horses. I was sporty, and while I certainly did find books I enjoyed during my preteen and teen years, there just didn’t seem to be “enough” sporty books for girls. (Though I must say I loved that Quiddich was co-ed, but the Harry Potter series is on its own self of amazing for many reasons.) Sure, there were some “girl books,” as I called them at the time, that involved tomboys, but not as many as I would have liked. And, for the record, not all tomboys are sporty. Title IX was passed in 1972, but the children’s market seemed behind the times. Quite frankly, 13-year-old me was not very happy with this. If girls could play sports, why couldn’t they read about them?

My solution was to write the books I wanted to read. I’ve always loved to write and constantly had a pen in hand or was typing away on the keyboard of our old desktop computer. I was a writer, and I didn’t really care that I was a kid. In fact, I figured that made me a pretty good writer because who better than me to know what kids wanted. So I began to write stories for myself.

When I began to take creative writing classes in college, I knew I wanted to write young adult novels. I wanted to “fill the void” young me had observed in the market. I had ideas, but I needed to study craft. I needed to learn about creating conflicting desires and character arc and all that wonderful stuff. During my breaks, I read, and I found that in the previous few years, that period of time between leaving the library empty-handed as a teen and starting college, there so many newly released books I wished were there when I was a kid. I knew it would be a while before anything I wrote was published, but I was relieved to know I was no longer “filling a void” but rather adding my own voice to the mix.

Podium Finish is a novel I started when I was 16 years old. It was the book I most wanted to read at the time and an idea that I just couldn’t part with. I hope Podium Finish is the first of many successful novels, and I can’t say that I will always have sports play such an integral part of my manuscript, but I will say that one of the reasons I love writing about sports is that so many of the life lessons I learned happened on the field or on the court. Sports taught me discipline, hard work, self-respect, self-confidence, how to win and lose graciously, and how to be a team player. The list goes on. So, while my books do have a very specific target audience, one does not have to been an athlete or even female to understand or enjoy them.