Counting Coup: A True Story of Basketball and Honor on the Little Big Horn

FROM OUR EDITORS

Bookseller's Report
Counting Coup begins not on a basketball court, but in the tar-paper shack ghetto of Crow Agency, montana. There, everywhere amid the crumbling buildings and junk heaps are basketball hoops. Not N.B.A. fiber-glass-backed specials; tattered plywood and rope improvisations, netless circles rotting slowly under the August sun. The story that Larry Colton paints across this landscape has not been televised prime time, if it has been televised at all. Its heroes are girls' varsity basketball team of Harden High School in Crow. Some of them are white and some of them, native Americans, but all of their faces carry the toughness bred in a poor rural community beset with racism, alcoholism, and violence. This is a powerful, ultimately inspiring book; its profile of Sharon Lafarge, one of the Hardin ladies, exquisite.

ANNOTATION

Finalist in Frankfurt eBook Award 2000, for Best Nonfiction work originally published in eBook form

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"In Native American tradition, "counting coup" meant literally touching one's enemy in battle and living to tell about it. Now it means playing winning hoops and dominating one's opponent. COUNTING COUP is the story of the girls' varsity basketball team of Hardin High School in Crow, Montana. The team is comprised of both Crow Indian and White girls, and is led by Sharon Laforge, a moody, undisciplined, yet talented Native American who hopes to be the first female player from Hardin to earn a basketball scholarship to college. Larry Colton shows readers the hardscrabble existence of a rural small town beset by racism, alcoholism, and domestic violence, and in so doing produces a touching, heartfelt, and beautifully written true story that will leave readers cheering for the girls they have come to know."


DIMENSIONS: 6 x 9

SYNOPSIS

There was a time when "counting coup" meant literally touching one's enemy in battle and living to talk about it. Still part of the Native American tradition, today the phrase means playing winning hoops and dominating one's opponents. Capturing the divisive racism between whites and Native Americans and the hardscrabble existence of a small rural town, COUNTING COUP tells the story of the girls' varsity basketball team at Hardin High School in Crow, Montana. The team--comprised of both Crow Indian and white girls--is led by Sharon Laforge, a moody, undisciplined yet talented Native American girl who's hoping to be the first female player from her high school to earn a basketball scholarship to college. While following Laforge and the Hardin High School girls' basketball team for an entire season, Colton shows how the players deal with success, failure, friendship, rivalries, and racism.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Colton arrived in Crow, Mont., ready to write a book about a season of boy's high school basketball in the Crow Indian community. But when he saw graceful Sharon Laforge shooting hoops, he was drawn to her athleticism and fascinated by the dichotomy between her on-court focus and her off-court distractedness. To get closer to Laforge, Colton tracks her senior year on the Lady Bulldogs, from the first practice through tournament play. He rides the team bus, assists at practice, wins a spot as an "honorary seventeen-year-old girl," and is eventually adopted into the tribe by Laforge's family. In Laforge, Colton finds a young woman in distress; as she attempts to fulfill her own and her family's hopes, she struggles with the uglier legacies of her community: alcoholism, domestic abuse, abandonment, shortsighted tribal politics, fierce racism and misogyny. In search of a happy ending, Colton follows as Laforge sticks it out with her abusive boyfriend, raises two boys and struggles toward her high school and college degrees. To his credit, Colton effectively employs his position as an outsider to explore the group's culture, and his long-term perspective allows him to convey the drive Laforge needs to survive. However, by centering his focus on one person, he misses opportunities to reflect on larger questions. (In particular, he seems unaware of Ian Frazier's writing about Sharon Big Crow, a basketball star and hopeful who juggled similar pressures on a Lakota reservation in South Dakota.) Nonetheless, Colton's love of basketball and caring insights deliver a sad but ultimately hopeful sort of Hoop Dreams, complete with the struggle for maturity, a community's collective dream and the athletic grace that can momentarily hold the world at bay. Author tour. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

VOYA

The author, an ex-professional baseball player and a regular contributor to Sports Illustrated, visited an Indian community in Montana intending to write a feature about its boys' basketball program. When he happened upon female wonder Sharon LaForge, the Native American star of the girls' team, he found a better story. The book follows LaForge and her teammates from preseason workouts to a tumultuous postseason as they aimed for their first-ever state championship. Offering far more than a blow-by-blow description of ball games, although that portion is written with breathtaking excitement, Colton becomes part of the community and delves into the teammates' personal lives, discovering several layers of family, racial, and societal pressures. LaForge's teammates resent her preferential treatment by the coach, the Indian girls often side together against the white girls, and LaForge must deal with painful injuries, an alcoholic mother, an absentee father, an abusive boyfriend, and the manic aunt who raises her. The reader shares the author's exasperation at some of the awful life decisions LaForge makes, many related to the Crow traditions she embraces. In the end, the story is not about whether the team goes all the way but about how people deal with what life has given them with grit and determination. A peek at the whole team five years later reveals some real surprises. Readers, male and female, interested in a snapshot of modern Native culture, the normal stresses of high school, or the travails and triumphs of an underdog sports team will love this fascinating, beautifully written book. VOYA CODES: 5Q 3P S A/YA (Hard to imagine it being any better written; Will appeal withpushing; Senior High, defined as grades 10 to 12; Adult and Young Adult). 2000, Warner, 420p, $24.95. Ages 16 to Adult. Reviewer: Kevin Beach SOURCE: VOYA, August 2001 (Vol. 24, No. 3)

Library Journal

Sometimes a book surprises a reader, sneaking up on him. That is just what happened with Colton s new work. This is a great book! It s about women s sports; it is about high school kids; it s about racial divisions between whites and Indians. Colton spent a year with the girls varsity basketball ream at Hardin High School in Crow, MT. Crow is a barren town in eastern Montana, close by the Crow Indian Reservation, that lives for high school basketball. Colton, a former major league baseball player, was taken with the basketball team s drive to gain a state championship for the first time and focused on a Crow girl who hoped to be the first girl from her high school to earn a basketball scholarship to college. Colton deals well with the racial division between the white girls and the Crow members of the team. In spending a year with the team, the author sees all the highs and lows (and there are many of both) in the ultimately unsuccessful quest for the state championship. This microcosm of high school athletics is highly recommended for all public and high school libraries. William Scheeren, Hempfield Area H.S. Lib., Greensburg, PA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Ann Collette

To "count coup," especially by touching one's enemy on the chest in battle, was considered the bravest act a young Plains Indian warrior could perform. Fascinated with Native American athletes, the author, a former professional baseball player, decided to spend time at the Crow Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana exploring why Native American teen-age boys renowned for their basketball prowess so rarely live up to their potential. Instead of boys' teams, though, three chance encounters with seventeen-year-old Sharon LaForge, co-captain of her high school basketball team, led Colton to turn his attention to Hardin High's Lady Bulldogs. Racism was only one of the factors that undermined the team. For all their passionate support of the Lady Bulldogs, parents, often alcoholic and, for the most part, living in terrible poverty, exercised little control over their children, with no discipline off court and no curfew. In a deceptively breezy, almost conversational prose style, Colton, who weaves his story into that of Sharon's, covers, in some very exciting writing, the team's rise and fall as it makes it all the way to the state championship.

Kirkus Reviews

The social dilemmas faced by present-day Native Americans are revealed in this journalistic look at a high school girls' basketball team in Crow, Montana.