Playing on Common Ground, a guest post by Robert Lipsyte

My latest YA novel, Rhino’s Run, opens with a punch: a football player decks a social warrior in front of the entire school. It’s a scene I’d been thinking about for years but never wrote because I couldn’t figure out why Rhino would risk his varsity career, the only thing he truly cared about.
And then I got it, chatting with some high school football players who confided how much they hated their coach and his rules but felt trapped in a system that demanded submission. So why, I asked, didn’t they stand up for themselves? It was their duty to suck it up and follow orders, they said, they were football players. I began to wonder what would happen if one of them, a captain perhaps, while trying to defend those rules discovered that the system was not what he thought it was, that it could be hypocritical, cruel, and corrupt? Would that be too raw, too political for a YA novel about football?
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But what better place? After all, America feels so raw and political these days that one of the few common grounds we take for granted is high school football and its presumed values of decency, meritocracy, and fair play. But what happens when those values are violated and the grown-ups in charge don’t step up to make things right?
As a long-time sportswriter, I’ve had an eye on the importance of high school football as a shaper of standards and attitudes for many years.
By seventh grade, I’ve come to believe, most kids have been pressed into making a lifelong choice by swearing allegiance to one of school’s two dominating institutions – the gym and the library. This is more than checking a preference for baller or bookworm (you’re rarely told you can be both). It’s about falling into a divide that has limited the self-images of so many teenagers and controlled them forever, personally, professionally, and politically.
That divide was vividly described to me in the 1960’s, another turbulent time, by an Olympic rower and college crew coach, Bill Stowe, who told me that young men were either jocks or pukes.
The jocks, he said, such as his rowers, were brave, manly, ambitious, focused, and goal-driven while the pukes were woolly, distractible, girlish, and hampered by their lack of certainty that nothing mattered as much as winning. Pukes (also known as nerds, dorks, etc.) included hippies, pot smokers, and former English majors like me.
As such, I pushed back. The trouble with jocks, I told him, is that boys who buy into jock culture believe in surrendering to authority and winning by any means necessary, including intimidation and cheating. Since he didn’t seem to object to that, I figured the coach and I might have trouble finding common ground.
And yet, I never lost hope that somewhere between the gym and the library was a place to join forces and drive toward a healthier, more hopeful world. Where to start? And then I discovered YA fiction.
My YA idols, Judy Blume and Robert Cormier, wrote books imbued with honesty, understanding, and compassion, the very soil of common ground. (Unsurprisingly, Cormier’s masterpiece, The Chocolate War, opens with a high school football scene.)
In my own debut YA novel, The Contender, the hero was a 17-year-old African-American high school dropout and I was surprised and delighted when so many white kids, including girls, told me they identified with him. (They still do.) Talk about common ground, that safe place where people can discuss their differences!
I know this seems like a lot to load onto teen novels, especially in this fragmented time, but after some sixty years of writing them, talking to boys and girls who read them, and to the librarians and even coaches (yes, coaches) who slipped them into sometimes reluctant hands, I’m convinced that pumping books instead of iron is a better way of dealing with the insecurity and isolation affecting so many kids these days, especially boys.
Boys are the most obvious losers, so often turned off reading altogether by books to a large extent ostentatiously written, published, and read by females. It’s a shame because boys are tacitly encouraged to avoid what girls can take for granted, that good fiction is often a primer for good relationships, for coming to understand each other.
I’m not here to say that sports fiction is the answer, but the good ones can offer a playbook to a boy (and more and more these days to a girl, although that’s a different story), supporting the strength to be skeptical, brave and kind. Unfortunately, too often the climax of sports novels involves a game won by the main protagonist thanks to his higher moral standards.
The YA world has changed enormously since Blume, Cormier, and I began publishing more than a half-century ago. I think the writing is generally better, smarter, and bolder. My 12-year-old grandson and I share a love of reading Rick Riordan to each other and every so often we feel challenged by his accepting and playful attitude toward the sex lives of Olympic gods.
The rising availability of LGBTQIA+ fiction and books with BIPOC characters are especially welcome, not only as support for the kids who identify with them but also as wake-ups for the plain old vanilla straight boys, jocks included. Jocks have their problems, on and off the field, but they’re too often the cause of problems for others. Librarians and coaches are equally aware that the bullies and troublemakers who disrupt schools often come from the gym. Jocks need the civilizing effect of reading about themselves and the “others” they’ve been conditioned to feel superior to.
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I’d like to believe that an abundance of quality fiction for boys could lead us closer to world peace or at least less hassling in the hallways. All I do know for sure is that my hero, Rhino, never quite makes friends with the social warrior he punches. But they learn to respect each other and work together, to understand that both the gym and library can be safe places for them. That’s because they had the good fortune to meet on the common ground of a YA novel.
Meet the author

Robert Lipsyte is the author of twelve acclaimed novels for young adults and is the recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award honoring his lifetime contribution to the genre. His debut YA novel, The Contender, has sold more than one million copies. He was an award-winning sportswriter for the New York Times and the Emmy-winning host of the nightly public affairs show The Eleventh Hour. He lives on Shelter Island, New York, with his wife, Lois, and his dog, Apollo.
About Rhino’s Run
“You can’t play it safe when you’re the captain.”
From celebrated author Robert Lipsyte, this powerful coming-of-age follows high school football player Ronnie “Rhino” Rhinehart after a violent incident at school leaves him questioning everything he ever believed.
Ronnie Rhinehart, better known as Rhino on the field, is the captain of his high school team in Woodhaven, a small town obsessed with football. His only goal is to earn a Division I football scholarship so he can escape this town forever. Until the day he punches Josh Kremens in the face.
To avoid serious punishment and stay in school, Ronnie is forced to join Group, a cast of misfits who discuss their feelings with a counselor. At the same time, tensions are rising on the football team. Not everyone is happy that Ronnie, a junior, was named captain, especially Cogan and his friends the Berserkers. Other than his best friend, Andy, Ronnie struggles to find solace and support, even at home, where his dad puts pressure on him to maintain his role on the team. Reluctantly, Ronnie finds himself liking aspects of Group, even if he isn’t always a welcome presence to the other members. Then one fateful day, Keith, another Group member, comes to school with a gun . . . and everything changes.
ISBN-13: 9780063343870
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 01/28/2025
Age Range: 13 – 17 Years
Filed under: Guest Post

About Amanda MacGregor
Amanda MacGregor works in an elementary library, loves dogs, and can be found on BlueSky at @amandamacgregor.bsky.social.
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