In conversation are Jennifer Iacopelli and Sarah Henning, who both have new YA contemporary girl power sports romances with a major emphasis on the sports side of things. Jennifer’s Break the Fall drops on February 18th and features the world’s most elite gymnasts navigating both the Olympics and a scandal tinged in shades of the real-life sexual abuse scandals that rocked the gymnastics world. Meanwhile, Sarah’s Throw Like a Girl, out now, follows a down-spiralling softball player as she winds up playing not-so-backup quarterback on her ex-boyfriend’s football team. Here Jennifer and Sarah discuss the intricacies of writing about the young adult experiences of top level athletes.
It almost seems uncommon for “sports books” to have actual sports in them. Why was it important to you to include actual, real-live sports in Break the Fall and Throw Like a Girl?
Jennifer: For me, when writing sports fiction, the sport itself is what the plot will stem from, so it’s almost impossible for me to write a book about sports that doesn’t heavily include the competition, practices and training that would be a major part of any athlete’s life. Often we’ll see books about an athlete that’s injured or an athlete that had to give up their sport as an exploration of their identity away from the thing they love, but that’s been done so much, I’m more interested in what it takes to strive to compete at the highest levels, to try to win and what happens when you do (or don’t). Also, from a craft perspective, if you’re writing a book about an athlete, part of your world building should be the sport itself. It’s like if you were writing a fantasy novel where there’s magic and you character can do magic and the magic is important to the plot, but you never actually write scenes with them doing magic. What’s the point? In Break the Fall, I was writing a book about an elite gymnast and if the gymnastics could just be plucked out and replaced with something else without the reader noticing, then I haven’t done my job as an author in building the world around my characters.
Sarah: I totally agree what Jennifer said. I think often “sports” books are books that center on an athlete for the sole purpose of having a love interest who is hot. I’m not kidding. How many football romances have you read without actual football except mention of how muscular a (male) love interest is? Or, if the girl is an athlete, usually it’s a device to make her skinny, or “not like other girls” because she has outside interests. This drives me bananas. Because, like Jennifer said, what’s the point? We are more than what our bodies look like or can do, and our characters and their journeys should reflect that. In Throw Like a Girl, I wanted to make sure that both my main character Liv, and all of the other athletes, were well-rounded people we saw on the field and off in their full capacity.
A follow-up question: What were some of the considerations you made to make sure the sports content could be understood across a broad readership?
Jennifer: The easiest way I’ve found to make the sports content understood is to give the reader some keywords to hook on to and repeat them often in the character’s head and in dialogue with coaches in order to “tell” some of the necessary information to the reader in advance. I’ve also found that attaching certain actions to success or failure on the field or in competition helps the reader understand whether something is important, even if they don’t get the intricacies of the actual athleticism behind the skill. Also, I’ll make sure that during the competition scenes I’ll really zero in my focus on how my character is feeling about their performance. In Break The Fall, a reader might not understand the ins and outs of a fly-away triple twist dismount on uneven bars, but they’ll understand that it’s hard, rarely performed and that Audrey needs to land it in order to do well. I’ll compare it again to if I were writing a fantasy novel with magic. We don’t always need to know the exact potion recipe or how many times a witch has to stir it to make it effective, just what the potion does and how it whether it works or not will impact the story. I do also try to include a certain level of detail for readers who do understand the ins and outs of whatever sport I’m writing about so it doesn’t feel watered down or, my worst nightmare, inaccurate. It’s a delicate balance to be sure!
Sarah: Yes, it’s all about balance! Honestly, in a first-person sports narrative, it would be completely unbelievable for an athlete to dumb things down to the point where he or she doesn’t sound like an athlete at all. It would also be incredibly annoying for the athlete to speak in so much jargon that it’s not understandable to your average reader. I do hope my readers learn something about football from Throw Like a Girl but I don’t want to ruin their reading experience by making them Google things every five minutes. This is where my background as a sports journalist has really been helpful. I spent years writing or editing sports stories with the intent to put readers at the game and to make the sequence of events understandable to a broad audience at a seventh-grade reading level. That experience was extremely helpful in ensuring that the games, practices, and even individual drills Liv goes through are things any reader can understand while also being something someone who has played football can recognize. That said, I did benefit greatly from a set up where I had an elite athlete in another sport be a newie in another sport—this meant Liv was grounded in athletics but also in need of an education, which she often gets in dribs and drabs from Grey and her coaches.
What were some of the stereotypes you were interested in subverting as part of these stories?
Jennifer: One silly one, at least, in Break The Fall, is that sporty girls don’t like makeup. My main character Audrey loves girly things, especially eyeshadow and eyeliner. She’s the team’s makeup a few times over the course of the book. One of the less silly stereotypes I definitely wanted to tackle was that gymnasts are somehow these unemotional, stoic beings. I think real life gymnasts have done a good job in the last few years totally demolishing that stereotype in the media, but I wanted to add one last tangible stomp on it. I also wanted to make sure to include the athletes supporting each other. I think gymnasts have had a bad rep because their sport takes so much focus that they don’t root and cheer for each other. I know they do and thus, so do my characters, on and off the competition floor!
Sarah: Football players often get a bad rap because they play this brutal sport, constantly sacrificing their bodies. Often, they’re stereotyped as stupid, sexist, single-minded, and violent, and that is not fair. I wanted to subvert all of those stereotypes and turn the football player trope on its head. Because of that there is not a major thread in Throw Like a Girl where Liv is the target of sexism, nor is she hit on by other players, or tormented in any way because she is a girl. I also personally hate the stereotype that athletes, especially highly talented ones, are somehow stupid. There are so many student-athletes that take all the focus and drive they apply to their particular sport and use it in the classroom. High achievement in one area does not bar a person from being high achieving in another. In fact, some of my favorite scenes in Throw Like a Girl feature Liv and several other football players in a high-level math class together. Even better, this big, burly, offensive lineman is revealed to be a state-rated mathlete!
What attracts you to sports stories?
Jennifer: I’ve always loved sports. I grew up playing tennis and softball the most and I’ve always been a fan of sports. Unlike Sarah, I was way too tall to ever be a gymnast, so I poured my love of that sport onto the page instead. As a writer, though, sports stories are great because they create inherent conflict on a variety of levels. There’s competition in the sport, between teammates and coaches and then also within the athlete driven by the sport.
Sarah: As I mentioned earlier, I was a sports journalist—both a reporter and a copy editor over a time period of almost 10 years. I covered everything from high school to college to professional sports in all arenas, from football to basketball to professional tennis and golf. I gravitated toward a sports specialization because I’m a total sucker for the drama of it all. If you think about it, sports stories already have all the great parts of novels baked in—an ultimate goal, a dedicated protagonist, antagonists who want it just as bad, a big climax in competition, and then either a positive or negative outcome and all the emotions that come with that.
Were you an athlete? If so, how did that experience inform this book?
Jennifer: I was an athlete, as I said earlier, but nowhere the level of the athletes I write about. However, that doesn’t mean I cared less than they do, so I can often reflect back on my own experiences in big moments where the pressure was on for me to deliver and be able to amply it by a thousand or a million when writing an elite athlete on the page!
Sarah: I was an athlete! I was a competitive gymnast, though never to the level Jennifer writes about. I had to quit the summer before high school because of a chronic back injury and I took up running because both my parents are marathoners. I’m slow and not great but I’ve completed several marathons and ultramarathons and love that running is a sport that I’ve been able to keep doing for years on end. Honestly, Liv goes on non-coach-prescribed runs often in this book and that’s because she’s mentally built like me—she likes to stay active and keep on her game, plus she finds running relaxing like I do. We (Liv and I) are both aware that most people hate running with a passion.
Jennifer: I’d like to submit for the official record, because she is way too modest, that Sarah completing several marathons and ultramarathons makes her a total badass and that “slow and not great” are hilarious things to say about someone who has done that.
Sarah: HA.
Who are some of your favorite athletes? They don’t have to be reflected in your books.
Jennifer: I am an obnoxiously intense Yankees fan, so my large adult son Aaron Judge is my current favorite athlete. I will forever be a Roger Federer fan. His greatness and class on and off the tennis court just stuns me. And my all time favorite gymnast is Kyla Ross, who won gold with the US in London and then went on to UCLA where she is kicking some major butt in the NCAA!
Sarah: And this is where we converge and diverge! Of course, I’m a football fan (duh), and I’m loving every minute of Patrick Mahomes breathing new life into my Chiefs. I’m also a huge basketball fan, but Jayhawks only, because I will bleed crimson and blue forever (Rock Chalk!). That said, my favorite athlete is Rafael Nadal. I’ve been following him since he was sixteen and I basically drop everything to watch him—I’m going to be so sad when he finally retires. My favorite all-time gymnast is far more old school than Jennifer’s: I grew up idolizing Kim Zmeskal, who if you don’t know, was World All-Around Champion in the early 1990s. My love for Kim has never waned, even though her career and the barriers she broke have been overshadowed by the Magnificent Seven and everything after.
Jennifer: Butting back in to say that the coach in Break the Fall is definitely inspired in part by Kim Zmeskal who was an incredible gymnast in her day, but is now an equally impressive coach who treats all of her athletes with the respect and care they deserve!
Sarah: She really is the best!
What’s next for you?
Jennifer: I’m working on my next sports book! I can’t say much about it yet, but I can tease that it’s ice dancing meets Jane Austen’s Persuasion and I’m SO excited about it!
Sarah: Ooooh, I can’t wait to read that! Triple axels and banter! My next is the first in a new fantasy series. It’s out July 7th, and it’s a gender-swapped Princess Bride-type tale called The Princess Will Save You, in which a princess’s commoner true love is kidnapped in a plot to push her hand into marriage and instead of giving in, she goes to rescue him herself. Take that, patriarchy!
