Never Ran, Never Will: Boyhood and Football in a Changing American Inner City

-Finalist for the 2019 PEN/ESPN Literary Sports Writing Award-Winner of the New York Society Library's 2019 Hornblower Award-One of BuzzFeed's "Best Books of Fall 2018" and "Best Nonfiction Books Of 2018"-One of Booklist's "Top 10 Sports Nonfiction: 2018"This uplifting story of a youth football team shines light on a group of preteen boys fighting for upward mobility while on the frontlines of monumental shifts in America, living in a community eroding from gentrification and playing a sport threatened by a growing understanding of its risks.Never Ran, Never Will tells the story of the working-class, mostly black neighborhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn; its proud youth football team, the Mo Better Jaguars; and the young boys who are often at the center of both. Oomz, Gio, Hart, and their charismatic, vulnerable friends, come together on a dusty football field. All around them their community is threatened by violence, poverty, and the specter of losing their homes to gentrification. Their passionate, unpaid coaches teach hard lessons about surviving American life with little help from the outside world, cultivating in their players the perseverance and courage to make it.Football isn't everybody's ideal way to find the American dream, but for some kids it's the surest road there is. The Mo Better Jaguars team offers a refuge from the gang feuding that consumes much of the streets and a ticket to a better future in a country where football talent remains an exceptionally valuable commodity. If the team can make the regional championships, prestigious high schools and colleges might open their doors to the players.Five years in the reporting, Never Ran, Never Will is a complex, humane story that reveals the changing world of an American inner city and a group of unforgettable boys in the middle of it all.