All of these have been published since 2017, including some which will hit shelves in 2021. I wanted to highlight the recent array of YA books about girls in sports with a list of books where sports play a big role in the story. The problem seems to be that too often, marketing doesn’t play up the sports aspect or highlight that the girl central to the story is invested in athletics. The adrenaline of sports paired with the adrenaline of a new relationship, be it romantic or not, offers so much to play with in story telling.įuria by Yamile Saied Mendez had be thinking about this particular topic, too, as so many readers took to social media to talk about how few YA sports books featuring girls there were. Where it’d be easy to brush those books off as romance and not sports books, the reality is those two pieces of a teen girl’s life can be perfectly intertwined (as they could with teens of any gender identity). These books have indeed been heavily focused on the sports aspect, and many of them have also focused on a romantic interest with sports playing a role in the story, even if it’s not necessarily central. Since then, though, it’s been such a treat to see an increase in the number of YA books about girls in sports.
Bria Felicien, a reporter for Teen Vogue, talked in depth about this back in early 2017 as part of a fabulous package about teen girls and athletics. There used to be a real dearth of these books - we’d have one now and again, or we’d have a series that would feature girls in sports and that would suffice as the book about and for sporty girls. On a recent episode of Book Riot’s Hey YA, Hannah and I began to talk about the growth of YA books about girls in sports.
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