Coach [Track]
by Jason Reynolds
Intermediate, Middle School    Dlouhy/Atheneum    256 pp.
10/25    9798347102372    $17.99

Middle-school athletes Ghost, Lu, Patina, and Sunny each have their own titles in Reynolds’s Track series (most recently Lu, rev. 11/18); now it’s Coach’s turn. Who was he before he was an inspiring leader? How did he grow up to be so committed to his athletes’ lives? Reynolds delineates how track star Carl Lewis guides Otis (Otie) Brody’s path in his youth. Watching the 1984 Olympics on television with his father and witnessing Lewis winning the gold medal for the hundred-meter event took a boy who “wasn’t the athletic type. Couldn’t catch a ball, or dribble, or tackle” and made him a runner. Now, four years later, he’s a sprinter, with “9.99,” Lewis’s medal-winning time, written on his hand before each race. In Ghost (rev. 11/16), sprinter Castle Cranshaw says of his troubled home life, “You don’t know what it’s like, Coach. You don’t know.” But in this installment, we learn that Coach Brody does know. At the conclusion of the story, when young Otie is talking about his Olympic dreams, his mother says, “I think you gon’ make it. But if for some reason you don’t, guess what? I think you’d make a pretty good coach.” A strong entry in the series that provides backstory for the coach who has been there from the beginning.

From the November/December 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.