In These Girls Hope is a Muscle.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth

Sports, sex, and hope were the themes of my reading this year. As both an athlete and a coach of high-school girls, I was particularly excited about two new books on women and sports, In These Girls Hope is a Muscle, by Madeleine Blais (Atlantic Monthly Press), and The Stronger Women Get the More Men Love Football by Mariah Burton Nelson (Harcourt Brace). Both books discuss the power of sports--as a progressive, transformative force for girls in Blais's book, and as a regressive symbol of male supremacy in Nelson's.

In These Girls Hope is a Muscle is the story of the Lady Hurricanes--the high-school girls' basketball team from Amherst, Massachusetts, that captured the state title in 1993. I had been waiting to read the whole story ever since a very moving excerpt appeared in The New York Times Magazine last year.

Blais does a wonderful job of capturing the energy and life-or-death intensity of adolescence. The portraits of individual players reminded me of the girls I coach--boisterously struttion, with their boom box before a competition, dressing in team colors, with team hair bands, team dinners, and a panoply of other team rituals. They are also full of seriousness and focus, tenaciously, almost intinctively, hurling themselves at all obstacles: fear, pain, interteam rivalries, rigid social rules about femininity, and their own physical limits.

This is a story of sheer victory. Beginning on a low note, with the disappointing end of the 1992 season, Blais follows the determined evolution of the Hurricanes into state champions, and the changes that take place along the way in the players and the people around them.

There is something special, something pure, about girls' sports, Blais points out. Part of it is that the games are played for their own sake--there is no chance of fame or large salaries down the road. And part of it is that the girls understand and appreciate what a gift it is to be an athlete--something their mothers couldn't be.

"Just imagine what it must be like to go through puberty and have your body on your side," says one team mom.

The pride the girls stir up in the community, which starts packing the gym for games, is one of the most touching things about the Hurricanes' story.

Little girls ask the team members for autographs, and the Hurricanes' success spawns new interest in a youth basketball program, where the players work with small children of both sexes, who regard them with awe. For the first time ever, the...