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My Home Team

A Sportswriter's Life and the Redemptive Power of Small-Town Girls Basketball

Contributors

By Dave Kindred

Formats and Prices

Price

$30.00

Price

$38.00 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around September 12, 2023. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

In this poignant memoir, a legendary sports journalist writes about the team that changed his life: the Morton High School Lady Potters basketball team.

Dave Kindred has covered dozens of Super Bowls and written about stars like Muhammad Ali, Tiger Woods, and Michael Jordan. But a high-school girls basketball team—the Lady Potters of Morton, Illinois—stands apart from the rest.

In this moving and intimate story, Kindred writes about his rise to professional success and the changes that brought him back to his hometown late in life. As he dealt with personal hardship, his urge to write sustained him. For years, he has recapped the games of the Lady Potters, including their many runs to state championships. He attended game after game, sitting in the stands and making notes, paid nothing but Milk Duds. And the team and their community were there for him as he lost a grandson to addiction and his wife to long-term illness. 

Tender and honest, Kindred’s story reminds readers what sports are really about. He trades in the exhausting spectacle of Super Bowl Sunday for the joy of togetherness, the fire of competition, and the inexhaustible hope for victory tomorrow.

  • “Revered sports journalist Kindred…shares his own story, from his roots in Illinois to stints at newspapers like the Washington Post to a return to his hometown, where he enthusiastically and generously volunteers to cover the Morton High School women's basketball team, the Lady Potters, a commitment that brings him joy and carries him through difficult times. Admirably, Kindred avoids self-pity whether he's writing about personal losses or professional setbacks. Instead, he cites the inspiration of other legends, like earlier sportswriter Red Smith, and the camaraderie among contemporary sportswriters.” 
    Booklist, starred review
  • “What must the 16-year-old point guard have thought as this bespectacled septuagenarian doddered down to speak to her after the game, asking her about that pick-and-roll she ran in the third quarter as if he were interviewing Muhammad Ali after a championship fight? How could she have guessed that he had in fact done that very thing in his life . . . but now felt that this game, that she, was more important? One of the many wonders of the sportswriter Dave Kindred’s memoir My Home Team: A Sportswriter’s Life and the Redemptive Power of Small-Town Girls Basketball, is that by the end of the book, not only will that girl understand exactly why her game is more important, but so will the person holding the book.”
     
    Wall Street Journal
  • “An iconic American sportswriter returns to his Midwest roots and finds his greatest story…An enjoyable, poignant, meaningful memoir.” 
    Kirkus
  • “For those of us who followed his career as a columnist and reporter, this book brings back memories of some of his most memorable stories, interviews and experiences… It provides great insights into the life of a sportswriter at all levels and the trials and tribulations of family life and aging in a changing world.”
    Eric Sondheimer, The Los Angeles Times
  • Dave Kindred told me not to read this book. I ignored him and so should you. Gorgeous and searing, My Home Team is the story of a big time sports columnist, the envy of every American male: the guy sitting at the 50-yard line of every Super Bowl. The guy invited under the covers by Muhammad Ali. The guy, of course, is Kindred, who having seen it all, and written it all better than anyone could, grew tired of it all, and took his high school sweet heart home to the heartland where life turned as cruel as the rural Illinois winter. When loss piles upon loss, Kindred finds a new story and a new love in a girl’s basketball team that saves his life
    Jane Leavy, New York Times-bestselling author of The Big Fella
  • Dave Kindred has been a hero and a mentor of mine for more than 40 years. He can write funny or sad or smart. He does all of the above in My Home Team: A Sportswriter's Life and the Redemptive Power of Small Town Girls Basketball. This is a brilliant example of why Dave is Dave and why anything he writes is superbly done. You will laugh, will cry and you will be very glad you took the time to read this book.
    John Feinstein, author of Feherty
  • Spectacular.
    Joe Posnanski, bestselling author of The Baseball 100

On Sale
Sep 12, 2023
Page Count
304 pages
Publisher
PublicAffairs
ISBN-13
9781541702202

Praise

  • “Revered sports journalist Kindred…shares his own story, from his roots in Illinois to stints at newspapers like the Washington Post to a return to his hometown, where he enthusiastically and generously volunteers to cover the Morton High School women's basketball team, the Lady Potters, a commitment that brings him joy and carries him through difficult times. Admirably, Kindred avoids self-pity whether he's writing about personal losses or professional setbacks. Instead, he cites the inspiration of other legends, like earlier sportswriter Red Smith, and the camaraderie among contemporary sportswriters.” 
    Booklist, starred review
  • “What must the 16-year-old point guard have thought as this bespectacled septuagenarian doddered down to speak to her after the game, asking her about that pick-and-roll she ran in the third quarter as if he were interviewing Muhammad Ali after a championship fight? How could she have guessed that he had in fact done that very thing in his life . . . but now felt that this game, that she, was more important? One of the many wonders of the sportswriter Dave Kindred’s memoir My Home Team: A Sportswriter’s Life and the Redemptive Power of Small-Town Girls Basketball, is that by the end of the book, not only will that girl understand exactly why her game is more important, but so will the person holding the book.”
     
    Wall Street Journal
  • “An iconic American sportswriter returns to his Midwest roots and finds his greatest story…An enjoyable, poignant, meaningful memoir.” 
    Kirkus
  • “For those of us who followed his career as a columnist and reporter, this book brings back memories of some of his most memorable stories, interviews and experiences… It provides great insights into the life of a sportswriter at all levels and the trials and tribulations of family life and aging in a changing world.”
    Eric Sondheimer, The Los Angeles Times
  • Dave Kindred told me not to read this book. I ignored him and so should you. Gorgeous and searing, My Home Team is the story of a big time sports columnist, the envy of every American male: the guy sitting at the 50-yard line of every Super Bowl. The guy invited under the covers by Muhammad Ali. The guy, of course, is Kindred, who having seen it all, and written it all better than anyone could, grew tired of it all, and took his high school sweet heart home to the heartland where life turned as cruel as the rural Illinois winter. When loss piles upon loss, Kindred finds a new story and a new love in a girl’s basketball team that saves his life
    Jane Leavy, New York Times-bestselling author of The Big Fella
  • Dave Kindred has been a hero and a mentor of mine for more than 40 years. He can write funny or sad or smart. He does all of the above in My Home Team: A Sportswriter's Life and the Redemptive Power of Small Town Girls Basketball. This is a brilliant example of why Dave is Dave and why anything he writes is superbly done. You will laugh, will cry and you will be very glad you took the time to read this book.
    John Feinstein, author of Feherty
  • Spectacular.
    Joe Posnanski, bestselling author of The Baseball 100

Dave Kindred

About the Author

Dave Kindred has been a columnist for the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The National Sports Daily, Sporting News, and Golf Digest. Kindred is the author of several books including Heroes, Fools and Other Dreamers: A Sportswriter’s Gallery of Extraordinary People, Around the World in 18 Holes, Morning Miracle: Inside the Washington Post The Fight to Keep a Great Newspaper Alive, and Sound and Fury: Two Powerful Lives, One Fateful Friendship.

Kindred is one of only two writers who have earned sportswriting’s three highest honors: the Red Smith Award, the PEN America ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing, and the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting. He also has won the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame’s Curt Gowdy Award (for outstanding media contributions) as well as a National Headliner award for general-interest columns. He is a member of The National Sports Media Hall of Fame. He lives in Illinois.

Learn more about this author