I’m not a sports person as any of my friends would attest. Not watching and not doing. I’m not athletic and even if I were, my 4 foot nothing size would make me an easy tackle or block or whatever the term is.

But sometimes I get struck by a vicarious need to read a sports book to get the adreneline and passion I do not feel in real life when I see a ball.
The Pretty Tough series started as a brand I believe to encourage high school girls to pursue sports and spawn off into a webseries, and books, and the books certainly fit into their mantra.

While romance is part of it as it’s in any YA book, it doesn’t take away from how important the sport is to the protagonist. I think it was most surprising that sometimes the protagonist didn’t end up with a love interest in the end. Which may be saying more about YA as a genre than the series itself.

There’s also a strange thing regarding the authorship as the books’ rebrand name only one author-Nicole Leigh Shepard. But the first two books is supposedly written by Liz Legelaar and the third by Keri Mikulski (who was nice enough to sign my book so many years ago). Then goodreads makes it more confusing by implying Shepard wrote #1 and 5, Mikulski wrote all of them. I definately think the first two was written by someone else as the tone is radically different from the other four but I’m not sure the definitive authorship and why the brand would try to rebrand the whole series under one pen name.

Anyway, here’s my ranking. Or bracket. Or whatever sports term you want to use.

1. Making Waves: Technically, life-guarding isn’t a sport but it does involve a lot of swimming as Abby references her swim team records and technique throughout as she trains to win the lifeguarding competition. Important as she’s the only non-country club member employee in the competition and unlike everyone else, she needs the scholarship money the competition is offering. I felt this book was the best as it balanced issues of classism, the tense unrequited romance and filled with other characters that were three-dimensional and flawed.
2. Stealing Bases: Kylie Collins previously popped up in the series as crazy Kylie due to her insane jealousy issues. Like she literally destroys several girls’ reputations because her boyfriend can’t keep it in his pants. But now Kylie swears she’s over Zach and is trying to amend her psychotic reputation by focusing on getting into D1 softball. Unfortunately her jealousy rears up when a new softball superstar takes “her” spot as pitcher and Zach continues to be a narcissistic ass that Kylie can’t quit. It’s hard to reform a mean girl because it can seem like your tragic backstory approach is glossing over her misdeeds but Shepard manages to toe he line between sympathy and accountability and works up a good storyline where Kylie begins to recognize her negative habits and changes for the better.
3. Fifteen Love: A double POV between twins, Maggie and Bella. Bella is the perfectionist tennis superstar while Maggie has the talent but doesn’t feel like dedicating her life to the sport until she gets recruited by a famous coach promising they could be the next Williams sisters. Shepard does a great job highlighting the way tennis influences their lives and how it has affected their relationship where Maggie is hides her jealousy that their parents only seem to care for her twin and regard her as lazy while Bella is constantly on the edge of a breakdown because she has to depend on Maggie to get her up in the seed and has no time for anything else in her life. It also deals with issues like toxic coaches, burnout and actually explaining the sport to this novice.
4. Head Games: Taylor Thomas is a giant of a girl (at six feet and still growing) which is perfect for basketball and a total people pleaser. She has somewhat accepted that no boy will want her because they feel small compared to her. But when ulta cute Zach (yep, see above) asks her out, it invites a whole lot of drama. Taylor’s probably the most likable of the protagonists next to Abby because she means well and believes in “paying it forward” aka trying to rise above and be nice but I wished she actually did have a moment to stand up for herself and not feel bad about it when karma coincidentally strikes her. It feels like she never got the chance to set boundaries. Plus with all the stuff she got going on (avoiding Kylie, dancing around Zack, tutoring her teammates, helping her friend’s fashion show, training with her Dad), it felt like the book never had a breather. Nor a chance to address Taylor’s clear panic attacks.
5. Playing with the Boys: This is actually tied with Pretty Tough as both suffer from early 2000s syndrome. I mean references to Real World, MTV, 1999 Britney Spears, emos, Myspace, “mondo,” it almost hurts how dated it is. In the author’s attempts to be “hip,” the characters feel one dimensional. Still I enjoy the plot where Lucy becomes the kicker for the football team and fights through real sexism as she vies to be accepted by the boys even as she remarks that when others get on the team they’re accepted, she’s the only one who has to “earn” it. Plus she also learns how to stand up for herself with her father and her true tove interest when she realizes she may lose him because she took his spot, it doesn’t matter because he’s not worth it anyway.
6. Pretty Tough: Like I said, the datedness takes away the quality of the characters where Charlie joins the soccer team to spite her perfect sister only to learn she loves being part of a team while Krista learns to share the spotlight and play for herself and not the validation of others. The sister, and soccer aspects of the book is good but Krista’s other storyline with toxic friendship and boyfriend feels rushed like the author wanted to get through one event to skip to the end.

I’ll end this with one more book suggestion-A Cold Day Under the Sun by Sara Biren. With all these sports there is shockingly none about female hockey players. Except this.

Holland started playing hockey with her brother then joined the male Hawks team. She’s always been known as the girl. But this year the pressure is really starting to get to her.

Her town is hosting Hockeyfest for the first time. There’s gonna be NHL scouts and agents watching. All of Minnesota is going to be watching. And they’re all going to be thinking that she stole the rightful spot from a boy. Or she’s sleeping her way through the locker room. Or she just can’t cut it.

Holland is tired of constantly being undercut and Biren does a great job of showing the emotional toll it has on her from the casual sexism of her grandfather (who supports her but still can’t believe she’d be picked as captain. She doesn’t want to be captain but the assumption sucks), the disregard of the hockey old-timers. But the main focus is on the double standards that ensue when she starts to fall for the hockey captain who can handle a stick as well as sing glam metal at the top of his lungs.

Most of all I like how realistic Biren is in that there’s no big revelation from the old-time sexists because some people don’t ever get the revelation. It’s more on Holland in learning to harness her mental space and find the fun of hockey again while thriving in the sport she enjoys.