This year's selection about NKU national championship team
Thirteen Women Strong: The Making of a Team, by Robert Wallace
The thirteen women in this book are coach Nancy Winstel and the twelve players on her 2006-07 basketball team at Northern Kentucky University.
A native of Newport, Kentucky, Nancy Winstel played on NKU's first women's basketball team in 1974-75. She has been head coach of the same team since 1983. The twelve players in the book are the ones she coached during the 2006-07 season. The reader meets these players as they arrive as freshmen, learn Winstel's system, and become leaders of the team as juniors and seniors.
In 2005-06 Winstel's team had a magical season in which they compiled a 28-5 record, won the Great Lakes Valley Conference tournament, and won their first-round game in the NCAA Tournament. Even more was expected when the players returned for the season that is the main focus of the book. We watch these young women during the offseason and the preseason in which they prepare for what they hope will be a run to the national championship. We see how a team is made on the practice court as well as on game day.
Throughout the 2006-07 season we see these twelve players face one unexpected adversity after another, yet come together to again become national contenders by the end of the season. This growth prepares the players who will return for the 2007-08 national championship season with which the book concludes.
These thirteen women are strong because of the way Winstel challenges them -- and the way in which each individual meets that challenge. These players arrived on campus as talented girls. They are graduating as seasoned young women ready for adult life. These student-athletes embody, in a more dramatic and public way, the internal strength and dedication required by any student who wants to get the most from his or her college experience.
About the author:
Robert K. Wallace is Regents Professor of English at NKU, where he has taught since 1972. He became a fan of our women's basketball team during the fall semester of 1974, when Nancy Winstel was a student in his American Literature class.
He decided to write this book after seeing Winstel’s team win the GLVC championship in 2006. Following the next year’s team through the offseason, the preseason, the regular season, and the playoff season taught him much more than he had previously known about what it takes to make a team. In addition to watching practices and traveling with the team, Wallace interviewed the players, their parents, coach Winstel, and others associated with the women's basketball program.
Wallace's book was already in production when the following year's team began to play very well near the end of the regular season. The director of the press told him he could add a postscript if anything special happened during the postseason. So Wallace traveled to Kearney, Nebraska, watched Winstel’s team win the 2008 national championship, and wrote a new conclusion to the book.
Final note:
We look forward to the continued success and evolution of First-Year Program’s Book Connection and hope that you will join us in reading, discussing and promoting Thirteen Women Strong.
For more information please contact:
Leighann Rechtin
Office of First-Year Programs
Founders Hall 231
859-572-5498 / rechtinl1@nku.edu