A Game Born of Necessity

John Coy

The subtitle of Hoop Genius by John Coy, illustrated by Joe Morse, succinctly describes the reason the game exists today: "How a Desperate Teacher and a Rowdy Gym Class Invented Basketball." The young men at the YMCA had already run off two teachers by the time James Naismith arrived in December 1891. Naismith wanted to keep the guys from having excessive physical contact while also giving them maximum exercise.

Naismith combined a popular game from his Canadian childhood ("Duck on a Rock"), which rewarded skills in accuracy, with a requirement for speed, as the players ran up and down the court, defending their own basket and attempting to shoot into the basket of their opponents. The simple requirements of the game--two peach baskets and a ball--accounted for the speed with which the game's popularity spread. The game's 13 rules fit neatly on two double-spaced typed pages (reproduced on the book's endpapers).

Joe Morse's artwork connects past and present. He begins with stylized artwork in a muted palette of burgundy and cornflower blue, which includes period details but also conveys the immediacy and fast pace of the game. The contemporary images of the game at the close of the picture book connect back to that raw energy of those early unruly boys back in 1891.

As we draw down to the Final Four, we have a better appreciation for how James Naismith helped channel the energy of those young men (and a few young women, too) to bring us to the March Madness of today.

An International Pastime

from Take Me Out to the Yakyu

In Take Me Out to the Yakyu, author-artist Aaron Meshon shows that, at least for the boy narrator's family, baseball is as big a pastime in Japan as it is in America. The game becomes a lens through which we learn about the boy's life, his love of baseball, and the way that it unites the two sides of his family. 

Fans of baseball will recognize the title's play on "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," while those new to the sport will be able to figure out the meaning of "Yakyu" from its placement deeper inside the book. Aaron Meshon uses unfamiliar words in a context that allows children to figure them out through a mirror structure. We watch the boy head to the stadium with his American pop pop and to the dome with his Japanese ji ji.

We also see how fans in the two countries show their support (a foam #1 hand in the U.S., a noisemaker in Japan), what they eat in the stadium (hot dogs and peanuts in the stadium, soba noodles and edamame in the dome).  Meshon keeps the structure consistent, so readers always know from which side of the Pacific the boy makes his observations. 

Meshon celebrates the commonalities of and the differences between two cultures, and how one baseball-loving boy brings them all together.