The Back Roads to March
The Unsung, Unheralded, and Unknown Heroes of a College Basketball Season
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
#1 New York Times bestselling author John Feinstein returns to his first love--college basketball--with a fascinating and compelling journey through a landscape of unsung, unpublicized and often unknown heroes of Division-1 college hoops.
"Uplifting...[A] heartfelt missive to college basketball." —The Wall Street Journal
John Feinstein pulls back the curtain on college basketball's lesser-known Cinderella stories--the smaller programs who no one expects to win, who have no chance of attracting the most coveted high school recruits. To tell this story, Feinstein follows a handful of players, coaches, and schools who dream, not of winning the NCAA tournament, but of making it past their first or second round games. Every once in a while, one of these coaches or players is plucked from obscurity to lead a major team or to play professionally, cementing their status in these fiercely passionate fan bases as a legend. These are the gifted players who aren't handled with kid gloves--they're hardworking, gritty teammates who practice and party with everyone else.
With his trademark humor and invaluable connections, John Feinstein reveals the big time programs you've never heard of, the bracket busters you didn't expect to cheer for, and the coaches who inspire them to take their teams to the next level.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Every March, there’s at least one underdog team that shakes up the world of college basketball by unexpectedly beating an elite squad. Sportswriter John Feinstein spent a whole college basketball season visiting the little-known campuses of these so-called Cinderella teams, providing a much different picture than you get from watching SportsCenter highlights. Some of the people Feinstein meets—like Loyola University superfan Sister Jean, the 98-year-old nun who became the team’s unofficial mascot during their 2018 trip to the Final Four—are cult figures for hoops fans. Others, such as players and coaches from schools like DC’s storied historically black college Howard to Virginia’s tiny Longwood University, are barely known outside of their own campuses. Feinstein’s joy in stepping away from the media glare of the big-name teams is infectious. You can almost hear the squeak of sneakers and smell the stale popcorn. He keeps up a breakneck pace that squeezes in as many stories as possible. Like a great game, The Back Roads to March is never, ever boring.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this fascinating history, sportswriter Feinstein (A Season on the Brink) takes a look at lesser-known college basketball teams. In order to explore the "real joys of college basketball," Feinstein eschews the big money and future NBA stars of celebrated universities to focus on the sheer love of the game that characterizes smaller schools, covering the 2018 basketball season from November to the March playoffs. He describes his travels in vivid detail, showing readers the smaller arenas and atmospheres where the schools play, as in his description of University of Maryland Baltimore County's 90 85, double-overtime victory over Hartford in the America East tournament, a game "Very few people around the country would even notice" but that "for those who were there, it was a night to be remembered and savored for a long, long time." Most memorable, though, is Feinstein's eye and ear for the little-known coaches who aren't fending off NBA offers, such as Rick Byrd, who had coached at Tennessee's Belmont University for 33 years, but of whom Feinstein recalls, "I wanted to talk basketball, he wanted to talk golf." It's all net for Feinstein's passionate basketball history.
