Blind Your Ponies

Having lost every game for the last five years, Willow Creek, Montana's high school boys' basketball team's record is 0-93. So it's understandable that the boys' coach, Sam Pickett, is somewhat relieved when only three boys plan to go out for basketball, not enough to constitute a team. It looks like he'll be spared another humiliating season.

Then a Norwegian foreign-exchange student enrolls at Willow Creek. He's never played basketball, but he's 7 feet tall. Then another new student moves to town. Peter Strong played ball for one of the big schools in the Twin Cities, but his parents recently divorced and neither has time for him. So he's shipped off to Willow Creek to live with his one-armed grandmother.

Suddenly Sam Picket has a boys' basketball team and a small hope that this year they might actually win a game or two.

Blind Your Ponies by Stanley Gordon West is a delightful novel about this boys' team and the die-hard fans that show up -- win or lose -- game after game to cheer them on. It is a light novel without much angst or nail-biting suspense, but I really enjoyed it and was sorry have to leave the characters behind when I finished the book.