While W. Hodding Carter’s “Off the Deep End” brings to mind a couple of Disney movies – “The Rookie” and “Invincible” – that prove age is just a number when it comes to athletics performance, there’s nothing Mickey Mouse about this book.
Carter, a former All-American and NCAA national swimming champion at Kenyon in the early 1980s, recounts his postcollegiate quest to qualify for the Olympics in his 40s. Though the determination he employs in trying to achieve his goal is unquestionably inspirational, part of the appeal of this story is in the way it is told.
Though the book ends before we know if he achieves his Olympic dream, Carter is not coy about sharing the peaks and valleys, joys and pains, and successes and failures he experiences both in and out of the pool.
Carter’s dogged pursuit of an Olympic berth is marked by periods of fierce training while juggling work and family responsibilities, and multiple epiphanies about both life and swimming. He offers readers a poolside seat to a succession of masters’ meets, swimming contests, a swim camp and even a week-long return trip to Kenyon to train with the team, all of which he employs while chasing his dream.
It’s difficult to root against Carter, but the drama of whether he achieves his goal isn’t the only intrigue to retain reader interest. It’s the honest, funny and persistent way Carter follows his heart and teaches us to pursue what’s truly important that keeps the pages turning.
‘Warrior Girls’ issues warnings A generation of daughters blessed with the benefits of Title IX is embracing sports passionately, but Michael Sokolove warns that a reluctance to acknowledge gender-based developmental and biological differences – combined with a grinding youth sports culture – is “manufacturing” a plague of injuries that disproportionately impacts young females.
Parents are the target readership of Sokolove’s “Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports.” But as the dad of one such daughter, the New York Times Magazine writer also urges coaches and athletics administrators – especially high-profile mentors of elite collegiate programs – to use their experience and visibility to help parents stem a destructive tide of anterior cruciate ligament injuries and concussions.
For a book essentially built on a cause – to equip parents to cope with a culture that encourages children to devote countless hours to one sport and the tendency to overlook basic physiological differences that likely are behind the higher incidence of female knee injuries in sports such as soccer and basketball – Sokolove credibly reports cautionary tales of driven young athletes alongside highly readable accounts of researchers’ efforts to understand the mechanics and causes of ACL ruptures.
Simply put, it’s a book that anyone who works with young women athletes should become familiar with, as a checklist of factors that might warn an informed observer of a susceptibility to serious injury.
Sokolove pleads with America’s most visible coaches of collegiate women’s teams to “speak out about injuries and campaign for more research and more public education,” adding that “parents alone can’t make changes.”
But in “Warrior Girls,” Sokolove makes clear that ultimately it’s up to parents to end the injury epidemic, and he’s provided the basic information they need to get the job done.