OOYL Book Club: August Selections

There are TWO book events this month!

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We have not one but TWO book events happening this month. One will be our regularly scheduled book club, and the other will be a book event for a newly published book. Let’s get into it. Links to register for both events will be at the bottom of the email.

Becoming Caitlin Clark

I’m thrilled to announce a bonus event this month. We’ll be discussing Becoming Caitlin Clark: The Unknown Origin Story of a Modern Basketball Superstar by Howard Megdal. Not only that, we’ll be joined by both Howard and Molly “Machine Gun” Bolin for the Zoom event.

There are two Caitlin Clark books that published this summer, but Howard’s is the only one I want to talk to you all about. This event came about at the request of the Out of Your League Discord members, and I’m so thrilled that Howard agreed to join us to chat about his book about the history of Iowa girls’ basketball and the way it shaped the current women’s game.

We’ll also be joined by Molly Bolin Kazmer, who features prominently in the book as “the Caitlin Clark of the 1970s.” The book is less about simply “the Caitlin Clark effect” and more about the people who laid the groundwork for a star like Clark to materialize from where she did, at the time she did.

From the book’s description:

Spanning 100 years and several generations, Becoming Caitlin Clark traces the arc between the revered women who played the wildly popular game of 6-on-6 basketball in the 1920s and Clark in the 2020s, examining her fame and style of play in the context of her predecessors, while telling the story of the basketball-loving community that rallied behind her in college and beyond.

Howard Megdal's storytelling incorporates in-depth conversations with Clark; her coach Lisa Bluder; her Iowa teammates, including WNBA star Kate Martin; the top assistant coach at Iowa, Jan Jensen; the Caitlin Clark of the 1970s, Molly Bolin; vital figures in the growth of Iowa basketball like C. Vivian Stringer and Jolette Law; and even Jensen's grandmother Dorcas Andersen, who scored 89 points in the Iowa state tournament in 1921 and kept journals as she did so, brought to light here for the first time.

Our Zoom event will be on Wednesday, August 13th at 8 PM ET/5 PM PT. The conversation is only open to paid subscribers, and will be recorded and sent out to everyone who registered for the event, so you can watch it even if you can’t join us live.

A few days before our Zoom meeting, I’ll send out another email with the link to the event, along with a companion syllabus of additional reading and listening material related to the book.

Access to the Zoom event requires registration. You can register for ‘BECOMING CAITLIN CLARK’ BOOK EVENT at the link below the paywall.

The Other Olympians

Our August OOYL Book Club selection is The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports by Michael Waters.

This is another book selection that was requested by Discord members and I’m thrilled about it because I love talking with Michael about his work. Also, just to brag on Michael for a minute, The Other Olympians was a finalist for the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History and the 2025 Mark Lynton History Prize, and was named one of the Best Books of 2024 by The New Yorker, NPR and BookPage, nbd. If you’ve been around here for a while, you’ll likely be familiar with this book about the Olympic track athletes who transitioned back in the 1930s, and the origins of sex testing in sport, which can be traced back to Nazi Germany (shocker!).

The paperback edition just came out in June, and I’m so glad we can celebrate that milestone with Michael because paperbacks are not a guarantee in the current publishing landscape.

From the book’s description:

“In December 1935, Zdeněk Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. And in the wake of their transitions, what could have been a push toward equality became instead, through a confluence of bureaucracy, war, and sheer happenstance, the exact opposite: the now all-too-familiar panic around trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming athletes.

In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era. With dogged research and cinematic flair, Waters also tracks how International Olympic Committee members ignored Nazi Germany’s atrocities in order to pull off the Berlin Games, a partnership that ultimately influenced the IOC’s nearly century-long obsession with surveilling and cataloging gender.”

Our Zoom event will be on Sunday, August 31st at 2 PM ET/11 AM PT. The conversation is only open to paid subscribers, and will be recorded and sent out to everyone who registered for the event, so you can watch it even if you can’t join us live.

A few days before our Zoom meeting, I’ll send out another email with the link to the event, along with a companion syllabus of additional reading and listening material related to the book.

Access to the Zoom event requires registration. You can register for ‘THE OTHER OLYMPIANS’ BOOK CLUB EVENT at the link below the paywall.