7 Inspiring Books About Women in Sports Who Defied Expectations

I was a reader in a family of runners. With pre-teen grumbles, I reluctantly participated in summer track leagues, always bringing up the rear, always slowing things down, until one day under the blazing Tennessee sun I got my legs moving and earned my first ribbon. My dad puffed me up saying, “You were so fast out there, you could have been a Tigerbelle.”

In my family, the Tigerbelles were legends. Being compared to the elite team made me feel like a winner, even with my 3^rd-place yellow ribbon. In that moment, I was a Tigerbelle and I was invincible! There is power in knowing who came before us, whose shoulders we stand on, and how what they did makes our lives better. A seed had been planted, and the Tigerbelles book eventually grew.

The Tigerbelles: Olympic Legends of Tennessee State is the origin story of the team that dominated women’s track for nearly 40 years. Follow each woman as she earns her way to the team and discovers the depths of what she is capable of. Together the Tigerbelles battle Jim Crow laws, racism, poverty, and sexism, and prove to the world that women can run. 

Sports stories are the ultimate vehicle for inspiration. By following the athlete’s journey through early morning practices, and powering through the doubts of others, we race with them to the moment when the hours, days, months, and years of dedication pay off with glory. Track programs for girls flourished in the ’80s and ’90s, and women everywhere laced up their sneakers never realizing that the Tigerbelles blazed the trail first. Women’s sports stories do exist, but they are harder to find. Women and girls deserve to see themselves reflected in stories that give them the overwhelming conviction that yes, they can accomplish triumphs in their own lives.  

Here are 7 books that will make you laugh, cry, raise your arms high to celebrate hard-earned victories, and make you believe that overcoming the odds is possible. These books look back to the women who dared to defy expectations, and forward to the signs that leveling the playing field in sports and in life is an attainable goal.

Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women that Challenged a Nation by Tiya Miles

The draw of our bodies to movement is often inspired by nature, and this evocative collection of profiles illustrates how profoundly the historical leaders of our country from all races were affected by access, or the lack of, to outdoor spaces and argues why that same access is so critical today. Miles writes, “By thinking and acting outside, these girls who matured into women bent the future of the country toward freedom—for the enslaved, for the colonized, the dispossessed, the sequestered, the suppressed, and the subjugated.”

Inaugural Ballers: The True Story of the First US Olympic Women’s Basketball Team by Andrew Maraniss

Track and Basketball were both considered sports that were “for the boys” but New York Times bestselling author Andrew Maraniss spins a narrative of how wrong that assumption was. Telling the story of Pat Head, Nancy Lieberman, Ann Meyers, and Lusia Harris, this team of underdogs gathered from small colleges throughout the country started US Olympic Basketball for women in 1976, then went on to legendary careers. Coach Billie Moore told her team to “Win this game, and it will change women’s sports in this country for the next twenty-five years.” The only thing she got wrong was the length of time that legacy would last. Over forty-five years and counting later, the WNBA is still charging forward.

Soccer Grannies: The South African Women Who Inspire the World by Jean Duffy

Soccer is the dominant sport the world over, but in rural South Africa, women were boxed out of the action. “Mama Beka” pushed against these norms and started a women’s soccer league that is known as the Soccer Grannies. The Grannies became celebrated internationally proving that there is no age limitation to following your dreams and moving your body. Told by soccer-playing mom, Jean Duffy, this story drives home the impact of sports on every level in all parts of the world.

The Hard Parts: A Memoir of Courage and Triumph by Oksana Masters and Cassidy Randall

Abandoned as a child with severe physical challenges developed by radiation exposure from Chernobyl, Oksana Masters spent the first seven years of her life traumatized in a Ukrainian orphanage before being adopted by Gay Masters, an American professor. The two spent years in hospitals with corrective surgeries and treatment before Oksana turned her steel determination to survive into fuel to become America’s most decorated Winter Paralympian, medaling in four sports, powered in no small part by her mother’s love.

Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside by Melissa Ludtke

Shut out of the locker rooms, young Wellesley grad and Sports Illustrated reporter Melissa Ludtke was constantly missing the quotes that she needed to get the story. Locker Room Talk is the gripping first-hand report of how she took on Major League Baseball and with a ruling by Judge Constance Baker Motley, the nation’s first Black woman on the federal bench, changed the future of sports journalism for women. 

Good For a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World by Lauren Fleshman

Lauren Fleshman grew up with sports, and was an elite runner sponsored by Nike before she shook up the industry, determined to create positive change in the world that she knew so well. Exposing the contradiction of empowerment and exploitation in women’s athletics through her personal experience, Fleshman offers a “rallying cry for reform of a sports landscape that is failing young female athletes.”

Money, Power, Respect: How Women in Sports are Shaping the Future of Feminism by Macaela MacKenzie

Billie Jean King famously fought the Battle of the Sexes in 1973. It was a battle that women had been fighting and continue to fight to this day. Macaela MacKenzie gives that fight the much-needed power of information, leaving no more room for excuses. Interviews with Billie Jean King, Allyson Felix, and Megan Rapinoe illuminate the reality of the sports industry for women. “For every dollar that the NBA’s highest-paid player brings home, the WNBA’s highest-paid player earns just half a cent.” MacKenzie’s sharp journalistic eye draws the necessary parallels between sports and society and proves that women are equal to their male counterparts in skill and the ability to generate revenue, and it’s the industry itself that is leaving billions of dollars in unearned potential on the table.