Don Shelby

You don’t know me. I was once a Hopkins eighth-grade point guard with a bad knee and a high-game of fifteen. Even though I’d stopped growing at age eleven topping out at five-foot-one, basketball was my life throughout high school, when a third knee surgery finally ended my career. As a young girl, the Hopkins, Minnesota Girls Traveling Basketball program fed a passion before I began playing for the high school team. And, at that time, any book about basketball was like a bible to me—especially if it talked about young people playing basketball.

I mention this because my father, the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning journalist Don Shelby has written a book about basketball called The Season Never Ends: Wins, Losses, and the Wisdom of the Game (http://www.amazon.com/Season-Never-Ends-Losses-Wisdom/dp/1935098691/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1312831696&sr=8-2). He was my coach when I was in traveling basketball, and several of the stories found in his wonderful book are about our experiences together. Other stories include lessons he learned while playing a brand of Indiana basketball familiar to anyone who loves the sport, as well as his more humbling moments as an “old-timer” trying to recapture his glory days. A couple of these stories are apocryphal, like the one about the benchwarmer whose blind father passes away just before a game. Others are delicious slices of life, like the annual Thanksgiving basketball game, where the number of inches a child has grown between Thanksgiving takes on extreme importance in determining his or her future impact on the holiday game.

Anyone who was a ballplayer, and anyone who has ever coached or cared about one, may find much to touch them in this book.
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