The best compliment I’ve received in the last two years was from one of my (non reading) grade 8 books who said to me during an athletics event, “you know miss – I used to think you’re just the librarian, but now I know you’re so much more”. The history behind that is that after many years of being a middle of the pack longer distance runner (i.e after each event I was pretty much very much in the middle for my age group and distance), our athletics director at WAB was looking for some more coaching volunteers and I did some online certifications in track & field and cross country and joined the after/before school coaches as an extra warm body in Beijing. Here in Dubai I’ve mainly done track and in contrast with my teams in Beijing who were primarily the more academic types, I’m finding myself amongst some great kids who are very athletic but have an aversion to reading. Have I performed any miracles in making them readers? Well no, I don’t really think so. But I’d like to think I’ve gained some credibility and relationships that can open up conversations around what they could be reading. And it’s helped me in creating a new blended section in the library – our sports section.
New genre – sports
It started with noticing a lot of students were asking for books about “basketball” or “soccer” during our library classes, so initially a new genre of “sports” books was created split out of our realistic fiction section. That helped some during the first year in the new library. Then students were asking for more biographies of their favourite sports people and more books (nonfiction) on their favourite sports. Our nonfiction section in that regard needed some boosting, so we bought more books.
A new blended section – Sports
Since nonfiction, memoirs and biographies were upstairs and fiction sports downstairs it seemed logical to move them all to one place. So we trialed putting all our sports books together in a dedicated area. That meant pulling fiction, nonfiction, memoirs, biography, graphic novels and manga and sorting them by sport. Our poster was made in Canva in our library colours and is 3 panels representing the sports of our three sports seasons (template link). Our book spines have a small sticker of the sport represented to help with shelving.
We’ve probably doubled the circulation of our nonfiction sports books and it’s an area that garners a lot of attention. Unfortunately it is still really hard to find good fiction with sports themes. There are more good biographies and a small uptick in graphic novels and manga. Here are some of our best circulating titles.
Fiction
As you can see it’s heavily dominated by Jason Reynolds and Kwame Alexander. How I wish there were more authors writing shorter easy to ready and/or verse novels without naff babyish covers for this demographic!
- Ghost – Jason Reynolds
- The crossover – Kwame Alexander
- Booked – Kwame Alexander
- World in between : based on a true refugee story – Kenan Trebinčević
- Patina – Jason Reynolds
- Rebound Kwame Alexander
- Stanford Wong flunks big-time – Lisa Yee
- Defending champ – Mike Lupica
- Boy 21 – Matthew Quick
- Sunny – Jason Reynolds
Memoirs & Biographies
In particular the series by Matt and Tom Oldfield (from the playground to the pitch) and any of the Luca Caioli books are popular. And if you’re wondering who the GOAT is according to our students – Neymar and/or Ronaldo books outrank all the others.
Nonfiction
Anything soccer seems to dominate with basketball and F1 making an appearance. I was pleased to see one of my personal favourites – “The boys in the boat” tying with “The Barcelona complex” for 10th place as I’ve been promoting it heavily this year – I’m hoping the release of the movie will help it along as well.
- Stars of world soccer – Jökulsson Illugi
- The official history of the FIFA World Cup – FIFA World Football Museum
- Outcasts united : the story of a refugee soccer team that changed a town – Warren St. John
- THE FOOTBALL BOOK : the leagues, the teams, the tactics, the laws – David Goldblatt
- Return of the king : Lebron James, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and the greatest comeback in NBA history – Brian Windhorst
- The rise : Kobe Bryant and the pursuit of immortality – Mike Sielski
- All thirteen : the incredible cave rescue of the Thai boys’ soccer team – Christina Soontornvat
- F1 : the pinnacle : the pivotal events that made F1 the greatest motorsport series – Simon Arron
- The race of the century : the battle to break the four-minute mile – Neal Bascomb
- The Barcelona complex : Lionel Messi and the making–and unmaking–of the world’s greatest soccer club – Simon Kuper
- The boys in the boat : the true story of an American team’s epic journey to win gold at the 1936 Olympics – Daniel James Brown (we have both the YA and the original version)
What are we missing?
All the books by Mike Lupica / John Feinstein / John Coy are unfortunately showing their age now and are also very much written for an American rather than international audience.
We’ve had some more interest in cricket recently and just haven’t found enough books – fiction or nonfiction to meet that need. While there are more graphic novels coming up we need more of them.
If you have any great suggestions I’d love to hear them.
Two very interesting stories from the sporting realm are those of 
facts.
The last three books, are ones where he is part of an anthology. One thing that we’ve started doing as part of this unit, is where there are a number of “heroes” in one book, we’ve added all the names in the table of contents to our cataloging record. That helps students to find different perspectives, formats, lengths of explanation and viewpoints of the same person. We’re hoping that some students will start with one of our many combined biographies, for example the great series of 
Informative Flights - Musings of a Teacher Librarian 