Hoops By Walter Dean Myers

Walter Dean Myers novel Hoops is about a young black boy, Lonnie, who dreams of becoming a professional basketball player, "My game is my fame, and I knew it was together" (2). Coming from a broken home and living in a bad neighborhood, Lonnie sees that becoming a basketball player could be his escape from Harlem. Lonnie has a bad relationship with his mother to the point where he doesn't even sleep in her house sometimes. Instead he sleeps in the hotel he works at. While at the hotel one day Lonnie sees across the street that the gas station was being rob, taking this as an advantage Lonnie runs across the street and steals a case of alcohol planning to sell it. The next day when Lonnie goes to basketball practice he is introduced to their new coach, a drunk he meet last night who is involved with a gang. Lonnie refuses to be on the team with a drunk as a coach. Considering Lonnie was the best player on the team, his teammates wanted him to stay, so Lonnie proposes a deal with the coach, a one on one game and if the coach got to five first he would be their coach and if Lonnie got five first the drunk would leave and not be their coach, Lonnie loses. Throughout the novel Lonnie learns new things about the coach he didn't like and by the end of the novel Cal, the coach, becomes like the father he never really met. The purpose of this novel is to show that no matter how many challenges that hinder you to get to your goal, you shouldn't give up and have faith that you will get