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Sign up todayPlay Their Hearts Out
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Learn moreEight years of unfettered access and a keen sense of a story's deepest truths allow Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist George Dohrmann to take readers inside the machine that produces America's basketball stars. Drawing on eight years of reporting and telling the very specific tale of one talented young recruit, his coach, and his teammates, Dohrmann immerses listeners in the world of grassroots basketball, where men hunt for future NBA stars and young boys and their parents navigate a tumultuous course in pursuit of basketball glory.
At the book's heart are the personal stories of two compelling figures: Joe Keller, an ambitious coach with a master plan to find and promote "the next LeBron," and Demetrius Walker, a fatherless latchkey kid who falls under Keller's sway and struggles to live up to unrealistic expectations. In Play Their Hearts Out, Dohrmann presents a thoroughly compelling narrative, exposing the gritty reality beneath so many dreams of fame and glory.
George Dohrmann is a senior editor at The Athletic and was formerly an investigative reporter at Sports Illustrated. He is the author of Play Their Hearts Out, winner of the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing and the Award for Excellence in Coverage of Youth Sports. In 2000, while working at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, he won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories that uncovered a college basketball team’s academic fraud. Dohrmann lives in Ashland, Oregon, with his family.
Emily Rose Speer has been a vocal performer for nearly fifteen years and currently performs with the Canticum Novum Singers, a chorus conducted by Harold Rosenbaum in New York City. She has performed off Broadway and in regional and local theater productions around the country. She received her certificate in musical theater from the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York in 2004.
Reviews
“A wonderful and immaculately reported first book…It’s a brilliant and heart-wrenching journey, and a cautionary tale to any basketball player who thinks the path to the NBA is a slam dunk.”
“[A] tour de force of reporting, filled with deft storytelling and vivid character studies…”
“What Alexander Wolff and Armen Keteyian and Dan Wetzel and Don Yaeger did for college basketball recruiting, Pulitzer Prize–winning sportswriter Dohrmann does for grassroots basketball in this memorable book…His insights into the seamy side of youth basketball are investigative journalism at its best. An easy Verdict: this is one of the best sports books of recent years. Highly recommended.”
“Basketball fans frequently hear references to AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) summer leagues, in which young players have a chance to hone their games. The AAU leagues are often criticized for exploiting young kids, but most of these charges have been based on rumor or hearsay. Until now. Dohrmann, the last sportswriter to win a Pulitzer Prize, spent approximately nine years researching this book…In Dohrmann’s portrayal, Keller emerges as a shameless promoter of himself and his players, a poor coach, and a man for whom ethics are always relative. Money, of course, is key…In fact, as Dohrmann shows, everyone makes money in this ‘amateur’ enterprise except the kids. An eye-opening look at the underbelly of modern American sports.”
“Sit down and read the Friday Night Lights of youth basketball. Except the landscape is even darker here, greed and blind ambition stirred together in a toxic stew, the perversions of the modern American athletic dream even more perverted. This is nothing less than Dickens brought up to date, the characters in Oliver Twist dressed in Adidas warm-up suits. Amazing stuff. You’ll never watch basketball the same again.”
“Like a versatile baller, George Dohrmann swings seamlessly from position to position: investigative journalist, social critic, gifted storyteller. The result, Play Their Hearts Out is a gem of a book that addresses THE question central to contemporary basketball: how does such an unseemly culture spring from such an essentially beautiful game? You’ll come away rooting harder than ever for the kids and harder than ever against the basketball profiteers.”
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