%% This is a multi-book review: SEE also the title In These Girls, Hope Is Muscle. %% Although cut from the same cloth as Rick Telander's Heaven Is a Playground (1977), these books explore the world of teenage prep basketball from widely differing perspectives.In Muscle readers are drawn into the upper-middle-class world of the Amherst (Massachusetts) Lady Hurricanes basketball team. Though very successful in the 1991-92 season, the team didn't win the state championship until the 1992-93 season. Blais chronicles that title season, allowing each player to emerge as a multidimensional individual dealing with a looming future, boys, grades, dates, and dances. Because little is expected of them, the players find themselves having to be particularly aggressive, focused, and disciplined to function as part of a cohesive group. This is a rewarding account of how young women can take the traditional jock mentality, adapt it to their needs, and emerge not as less womanly but as better human beings.Last Shot follows a group of inner-city New York teenagers in the quest for Division I college scholarships. The young men of Coney Island's Lincoln High School realize that their last and best shot to escape the crime, drugs, and poverty of their neighborhood may be that scholarship. But it is no easy task. Most lack family support and appropriate academic counseling, and all live in a world where lawless gangs rule the streets. Frey picks up his key players the year before they defend their city championship, focusing on the meat markets called summer basketball camps, where big-time college coaches like Bobby Knight go shopping for bodies and where the dreams of a future NBA contract stir rivalries between the camp attendees. Unlike the Lady Hurricane teammates, these boys aren't struggling for self-esteem--they're playing for survival. (Reviewed December 1, 1994)

Expanding the Harper's piece that won a National Magazine Award, Frey deepens his devastating indictment of big-time college basketball's recruiting circus and the long shot at redemption it offers four talented New York City high school players. The flirtations of college coaches who promise TV exposure and a shot at the NBA might seem merely pathetic: One coach makes his play with inept card tricks; another signs a fawning letter to a recruit Health, Happine$$ and Hundred$.'' But for the young men Frey follows through their senior year at Abraham Lincoln High School, home is the projects of Coney Island, an end of the line literally, because it's a subway terminus, and metaphorically, because young black men seeking their fortunes have two options: drug-dealing or basketball. In a neighborhood where gang members rain beer bottles and taunts on players on the court and where turf wars lend an air of necessity to the style of basketball calledrun-and-gun,'' the father-figure pitches and broken promises of college coaches (many of whom have six-figure salaries and million- dollar endorsement deals with sneaker companies) are nothing less than abject. Harper's contributing editor Frey dishes the inside dope—the slave-market atmosphere of summer basketball camps, the corrupting influence of companies like Nike, the winks and nods with which coaches skirt the ``byzantine'' NCAA recruiting rules. And he does it without self-righteousness, simply letting coaches skewer themselves. Eventually the NCAA (which fares no better under Frey's blistering scrutiny) banned him from recruiting sessions. But what gives the book its powerful emotional punch is the bond between the players and the community of family, fans, and local coaches who support them—and between Frey and the kids. He captures—in lean, lyrical prose—the psychological drama and physical beauty of the game, and the joy it brings those who play it and see it played at its best. A heartbreaking, gritty piece of work."