Nothing But Net

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

As a basketball team, the Cape Breton High School Grizzly Bears really
stink. They have not won a game in living memory. Half of them cannot
pass and two-thirds of them cannot shoot. The only reason they have been
invited to the Nova Scotia Invitational Tournament in Halifax is because
they are the only basketball team in the northeastern division. The
thing that unites the team is an undisguised hatred of their star
player, whose ego is as obnoxious as his foot-odor problem. They go into
the competition expecting to lose in the first round, but when a
scheduling fluke gives the Grizzly Bears an outside shot at making the
playoffs, they suddenly discover a reservoir of team spirit and start to
score points.

In his third book about teen basketball, Michael Coldwell combines
wise-guy humor with lots of jock talk. His dialogue often sounds as if
it was written for a ’70s sitcom, and he tends to pump his prose full
of phrases like “more muscles than a seafood buffet” and “collects
rebounds the way some people collect stamps.” The book’s plot lacks
surprise. Nevertheless, Nothing But Net is a fast-paced, comic novel
that is intended to appeal mainly to television watchers. Recommended.