num_pages: 320
description: Basketball is the key to inner-city culture. It helps decipher speech and clothing styles, makes and unmakes legends, and defines much of popular history. The game rules the playgrounds, conversations, and lives of men young and old. Nowhere is this more central than at Skyline High School in Oakland, California. The Oakland Athletic League is home to some of the best high school basketball in the nation. It is also a place where basketball games clash with gang wars, coaches struggle to instill discipline in a world ruled by freedom of expression, where players struggle to get to practice, to make grades, and most important, to just survive. Skyline is about basketball and life, in a place where the line separating the two often blurs. Chronicling a season in the lives of the Skyline High basketball team, Tim Keown introduces an inexperienced but inspiring coach and a cast of unique and complicated young athletes - faceless names who dream of playing in the NBA, or at least gaining the respect of their peers in the Oakland Athletic League. Skyline examines the intimate relationship between inner-city youth and basketball by depicting the hold both the environment and the sport have on these young lives. It is a rich - and compelling - look at sports and sociology.
language: English
title: Skyline: One Season, One Team, One City
titlecomplete: Skyline: One Season, One Team, One City
ratings_count: 12
publisher: Macmillan General Reference