Reviews
"Moravian Academy's cross country team has a coach capable of orchestrating a championship season and an author who can chronicle the journey."--Associated Press "A beautiful, affecting book. Clean and pure and honest and loving. My hat's off to a wonderful new writer."--Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights, There are certain staples in the canon of sports literature, and they're staples because they continue to work. One of the biggies is the tale of the disparate group molded into a winning team by a dedicated coach. In Finding Their Stride, the theme again hits its own.Pont teaches English at a small, co-ed private school in Pennsylvania, where she also coaches the co-ed cross-country team. It's a quirky squad--Moravian Academy's strength is its brains, not its brawn--and the eclectic group that Pont takes on would just as soon burn the midnight oil, paint a picture, or perform on stage as cover a distance of ground. Naturally, they're the league doormats, wandering egos in search of cohesion. Over the course of one magnificent season, Pont finds ways to wake within them a dormant love of sport and competition, and they bloom, racing as a unit toward a Hollywood ending. After the season is over, after the accolades and prizes have been dispensed, after a long run of her own, Pont manages to supply an almost mystical meaning to what she--and they--have done: "I stop in front of my door, bend over, hands on knees, and breathe deep. My run over, I wonder, what does the Hindu desire after she has plunged into the Ganges? Hope to do it again." In the end, it's that simple. The humor, beauty, and depth that Pont puts into her stirring chronicle make the journey as rousing as its conclusion and its inevitability more renewing than trite., As the cross-country coach, an English teacher and dean of students at Moravian Academy, a small independent high school in eastern Pennsylvania, Pont should be eminently qualified to tell the true-grit story of her team of young, determined distance runners pushing themselves toward a winning season. But Pont has trouble finding her own stride in this overwritten personal narrative. Her attempts to describe the physical and emotional challenges she and her students face too often falter on awkward metaphors: "The cartilage in her knees under the taut skin appears to be smiling with bright molars." Pont expresses deep affection and admiration for her students, and readers will believe they are worthy of it. But her efforts to paint these young athletes as interesting individuals never quite succeed, as their stories and personalities blend together. Keeping them straight is much like watching the very races Pont depicts: readers get occasional glimpses of runners as they emerge from the pack or drop behind, but they're too far away, and the course is too spread out, to appreciate any one performance., "Moravian Academy's cross country team has a coach capable of orchestrating a championship season and an author who can chronicle the journey."-Associated Press "A beautiful, affecting book. Clean and pure and honest and loving. My hat's off to a wonderful new writer."-Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights, "Moravian Academy's cross country team has a coach capable of orchestrating a championship season and an author who can chronicle the journey."--Associated Press "A beautiful, affecting book. Clean and pure and honest and loving. My hat's off to a wonderful new writer."--Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights --
