Always an Athlete is a comprehensive study of the ways in which athletes climb what author Jenné Blackburn terms “The Mountain”—the journey from youth sports, through high school and college sports, to, finally, professional, and Olympic sports. This steady climb and success over a long period of time, however, sets up athletes for an inevitable fall off “The Cliff” upon their retirement from competition.
            To help athletes in transition, Blackburn identifies “Three Pillars of the Cliff”—Mental Health, Physical Health, and Athlete Identity—and describes the issues that athletes have in each of these areas after they retire. After training, sacrificing, and devoting years, even decades, to a sport, athletes at every level will struggle within these three pillars. Blackburn believes that athletes must evolve from a competition mindset to a wellness mindset and match their new lifestyles in order to soften this transition into the real world. Fortunately, the “Inner Athlete” honed over many years of training and competition can show up as a “Parachute” as athletics recede, and other priorities rise to the forefront of their new life.
            Ultimately, Blackburn proposes cycling as a foundation and universal tool to help retired athletes resolve a lingering loss of identity, mental health issues, such as anxiety and depression, and complications due to unchanged diet and exercise habits when they transition out of a performance-purposed existence. She advocates for fun community bike rides adjacent to sporting events and franchises to bring sports communities together around this critical yet overlooked topic for all athletes: life after competitive sports.
 

Once considered a kind of delinquent activity, skateboarding is on track to join soccer, baseball, and basketball as an approved way for American children to pass the after-school hours. With family skateboarding in the San Francisco Bay Area as its focus, Moving Boarders explores this switch in stance, integrating first-person interviews and direct observations to provide a rich portrait of youth skateboarders, their parents, and the social and market forces that drive them toward the skate park.

This excellent treatise on the contemporary youth sports scene examines how modern families embrace skateboarding and the role commerce plays in this unexpected new parent culture, and highlights how private corporations, community leaders, parks and recreation departments, and nonprofits like the Tony Hawk Foundation have united to energize skate parks—like soccer fields before them—as platforms for community engagement and the creation of social and economic capital.

 

Appearance- and performance-enhancing drugs—specifically, anabolic steroids (APEDs)—provide a tempting competitive advantage for amateur baseball players. But this shortcut can exact a fatal cost on talented athletes. In his urgent book Suicide Squeeze, William Kashatus chronicles the experiences of Taylor Hooton and Rob Garibaldi, two promising high school baseball players who abused APEDs in the hopes of attracting professional scouts and Division I recruiters. However, as a result of their steroid abuse, they ended up taking their own lives.

In Suicide Squeeze—named for the high-risk play in baseball to steal home—Kashatus identifies the symptoms and dangers of steroid use among teens. Using archival research and interviews with the Hooton and Garibaldi families, he explores the lives and deaths of these two troubled young men, the impact of their suicides on MLB, and the ongoing fight against adolescent APED use by their parents.

A passionate appeal to prevent additional senseless deaths by athletes, Suicide Squeeze is an important contribution to debates on youth and sports and on public policy.