The Final Cut

Description

Ryan, Zeke, Eli, and Miles have always shared a love of sports, especially basketball. When it's time for basketball team tryouts, these best friends practice together, compete in a local 3-on-3 tournament, and carefully compute their chances of making the team. However, when tryouts arrive, will all their athletic skills pass the test? Can their friendship survive if one of them doesn't make the cut? Fred Bowen keeps readers on the edge of their seats with play-by-play basketball action and real court strategy along with a story about winning and losing as well as the value of practice and competition. In the sports history epilogue, Bowen reminds readers that even famous players like Michael Jordan didn't make their high school basketball teams the first time around.

Fred Bowen was a Little Leaguer who loved to read and is still a lifelong sports fanatic. He is the author of the action-packed Fred Bowen Sports Story series, currently totaling more than twenty titles. For thirteen years, Bowen coached kids' baseball and basketball teams. He has also written a weekly sports column for kids in the Washington Post since 2000. He was a lawyer for many years before retiring to become a full-time children's book author.Bowen lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife Peggy Jackson. They have two grown children.

"Any youngster who has been involved in this kind of situation will identify with the characters' obsessive interest in evaluating the competition and enhancing their own chances of making the team. For better or worse, the self-image of adolescent boys is often closely tied to their success in sports and one of the strengths of the book is the openness with which Bowen examines this issue. There is a particularly moving passage in which the protagonist's stepfather recounts his experience in being cut from a school team in a manner that makes it clear that the incident still bothers him. . . . the novel is briskly paced and would be a good bet for use with sports-minded reluctant readers." -School Library Journal "[Bowen's] pacing is excellent and he has a knack for efficient evocation." -The Washington Post