Never Ran, Never Will

July 30, 2018
In an inspiring tale of sports and inner-city youth, Samaha, a criminal justice reporter for Buzzfeed, chronicles a season in the lives of the members of a Brooklyn youth football team, the Mo Better Jaguars, and its devoted coaches in the high-crime neighborhood of Brownsville as it was becoming gentrified. Of the team’s six coaches, some of whom work two jobs, Chris Legree and Vick Davis are the standouts as they struggle to keep the floundering team afloat throughout the 2013–2014 season. Davis’s son, meanwhile, was in jail, charged with armed robbery. The Mo Better players—ages eight to 13—prove to be determined and are eager students thanks to their dedication to football, and, indeed, at a time when one in three boys in the neighborhood were entangled in the criminal justice system, nearly all of Mo Betta players kept out of trouble. Samaha recalls key episodes, showing the coaches teaching the kids life lessons through football (“Start thinking big.... You don’t have to get a job; get a business, own something,” Legree told the players in the huddle at the end of the first week of practice). At the heart of Samaha’s unflinching book are the life-affirming themes of sports, transcendence, courage, and manhood.

Starred review from August 1, 2018
The Brownsville area of Brooklyn is tough, as the neighborhood motto indicates: Never ran, never will. Samaha, a criminal-justice reporter for BuzzFeed and a native New Yorker, spent years researching a Brownsville youth football program called the Mo Better Jaguars run by a dedicated coach, Chris Legree. Legree is a tireless promoter of his primarily African American players, always trying to get them into one of the city's better high-school football programs from which they'll have a chance to snag a college scholarship. Determined to do something for his community, Legree started the program after being inspired by 1995's Million Man March. Two kids showed up for the first practice. A few years later the team won the Pop Warner Super Bowl in Florida. But the book isn't about football. It's about the Jaguars as one avenue Brownsville kids have to escape a toxic environment in which they have routines they know to implement when they hear gunfire. Residents have to cope with drugs, guns, and daily violence, as well as, lately, a new threat: gentrification. If this neighborhood, with all its flaws, disappears, where will the people go? Samaha takes readers by the hand and leads them on a visceral tour of a peril-filled world that, nevertheless, thanks to people like Legree, can also become a seeding ground for hope. An important book on many levels.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from September 1, 2018

What journalist H.G. Bissinger did for high school football in Friday Night Lights, Samaha does for a youth football league in mostly black Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. Five years in the making, the story of the Mo Better Jaguars from 2013 to 2014 is both inspiring and depressing, a tale of children growing up in a mix of poverty, violence, and gangs. Samaha stresses that football was a means of escape for the boys ages eight to 13, many of whom aspired to a life beyond Brownsville; that is the beauty of the story. Through football, the boys are reminded that when they are running down the field, they are not running from the police. A criminal justice reporter for BuzzFeed, Samaha followed these players and their volunteer coaches from practices to games and back to their families. The final product is a joy for readers, an island of hope. VERDICT An inspirational sports book of narrative nonfiction, one that can be read for posterity.--Boyd Childress, formerly with Auburn Univ. Libs., AL

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