The past several months many states have been passing legislation to ban transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports. As an excuse for the blatant transphobia in these law, many of the lawmakers argue that they are doing this because it is unfair for ‘male athletes’ as they categorize them to compete in women’s sports.
The hypocrisy in this is remarkable, not only because of the usual argument that this is somehow being done to protect the perceived fragility of women but because all these (mostly) male lawmakers are pretending they somehow care about women’s sports. Leaving aside all of the arguments to repeal Title 9, let’s start with the basic fact that no male lawmaker, under any other circumstances, care about women athletes. None of them will get their pictures taken at a WNBA game or woman’s college athletic team, no matter how many championships they have won or how good the athletes are, if there’s a more famous, no matter how less successful, football or basketball player they can have a photo op with. Any male NASCAR driver is a better photo op than Danica Patrick. I’d imagine Venus and Serena got far less photos in their prime then with Federer or Nadal.
To be fair, though, this is how the world works. The sports pages may be the one part of the newspaper industry that’s still turning a profit, but it sure as hell has nothing to do with women’s sports. This is no doubt as true at the local level as it as the national and it starts as far as back as Little League and keeps going. The most successful woman’s high school team will get a fraction of the coverage of that same high school football team, even if they haven’t won a championship in decades.
This discrepancy is made painfully clear in We are the Wildcats by Siobhan Vivian a book published in 2020. The novel centers on a girl’s field hockey team at West Essex High School. The team has won five consecutive state championships and that school’s football team last championship banner ‘hangs dusty and faded in the gymnasium rafters. Yet it never strikes the boys as odd that they still dominate the school pep rally…whether they’ve actually earned the bleacher-stomping applause that beckons them…when they are introduced last.” Even the girls on the Wildcats know they will never be considered the ‘kings’ the football team is. It is this fact, mentioned early in the novel and never again, that underlies almost every action that the young women in this novel take. The field and the championships they win are important to them because they are practically the only people that will appreciate them. And it is for that reason that they are willing to do the kind of things that these same legislators who say they care about protecting women from transgender athletes wouldn’t think of protecting them from the actual danger they are in.
Siobhan Vivian is an YA Author who can do light female comedies (Stay Sweet, a novel about a young girl working in her small town’s old-fashioned ice cream parlor) and very dark horror (the Burn for Burn trilogy she co-authored with female legend Jenny Han about three high school girls friendship that turns very dark because of the secret one of them is keeping – and doesn’t know herself.) Like so many books I checked it out of the library last year, renewed it repeatedly but never got around to reading it the first time. I checked it out again late last year, opened it before I went to bed – and was up until nearly three in the morning, absolutely riveted by the secrets I was learning and the depths to the characters of the Wildcats.
We are the Wildcats divides it story among six potential female athletes who are trying out for the varsity. Last year, in a heartbreaking game, the Wildcats lost the championship for the first time in six years. The girls are all devastated, partly because they are ultra-competitive, partly because they all worry about what this will do to their possible college scholarships…and partly because they are all unhappy that they disappointed the manager, who Vivian only refers to in the novel as Coach. He was a legendary field hockey player, denied a chance to pro during an injury. The possibility that he would leave West Essex after losing the championship for the first time was real and terrified every one of the girls. He has returned for a sixth season, and now everyone is prepared for the ritual in which he chooses to give the lucky few varsity jerseys. This has been a tradition for six years and the girls know how it has gone. This year things won’t be the same.
The novel alternates between six different members of the team: Luci, the freshman in awe of the talent in front of her and the Coach. Grace, looking forward to being promoted from JV and emerging from the shadow of her brothers. Ali Park, the goalie, who is revealing from the actions of an athletic rival at a key moment in the championship. Mel, the current representative of the team, and the coach’s favorite. Kearson, whose close relationship with her mother has suffered immensely since she joined the team. And Phoebe, the star player who suffered a leg injury halfway through the season and is still a question mark for whether or not she will be able to play this year.
The entire novel takes place over a twenty-four hour period between the final practice and the first scrimmage of the season where the players will know their futures. There is a ritual before every year that Mel has started called the Psych-Up, a miniature prep rally for the team that gets them all hyped out for the season that is to come. This year Coach has decided to make a visit that everyone things will contribute to the overall feeling of joy and give an inspirational speech. He does give a speech, but it’s anything but inspiring.
And that is quite enough of the plot, because I believe the less you know going into this book, the more stunned you will be by the revelations that follow and there are a ton of them in the last half, each of which are stunning to the team but not necessarily the reader because there have been hints throughout the book. So let’s focus on something we’ve become more aware over the past few decades and that is the abuse of power that so many coaches and managers at all level of sports are guilty of when they are put in charge. We’ve heard a lot of stories about cases of male coaches’ abuse of female athletes over the years, but We are the Wildcats is not about that, at least not in the sexual sense of the term. Coach is young – probably not even thirty – he is handsome, and there are a couple of girls on the team who clearly have crushes on him. But it is clear fairly early that Coach is not a predator in the sexual sense of the term, but actually something far worse.
From the early stages of the novel, we slowly become aware of the complete control Coach has over the Wildcats in his tenure. Under the banner of team spirit and the charge of victory, he has indoctrinated the women under the duration of his leadership – not just the ones we meet here – to believe in total devotion to the team and winning at the expense of all else. All of the girls we meet have sacrificed vital parts of themselves to be Wildcats and it has been such a gradual process they don’t even realize it. Winning or even personal accomplishments pale to the idea of Coach being angry at them. And so after his speech, they go about a ritual to that they think will make him happy, not knowing that there are darker underpinnings afoot.
The final hundred pages are as brilliant as anything I’ve read in years as one after the other each of the girls goes back to championship loss and the part they all think they played in it. At that point, the full horror of what these girls have spent their high school lives going through is laid bare as they finally face the truth about Coach.
I may have made We are the Wildcats sound unpleasant and grim, and there are parts where it is. But there are also moments of great humor as well as beauty within it. Vital to the novel is the relationship between Mel and Phoebe. The two were the vital part of the team for two years and best friends before that. Phoebe’s injury, Coach’s influence on Mel, and the defeat last year has laid it to waste and they are trying to ignore that problem more for the ‘good of the team’ than any personal feelings. Near the end of the novel, when the truth comes out about Coach, there is a moment of simple kindness by Mel that I found profoundly moving.
We are the Wildcats derives its title from the fight song of the team. Much of the novel is spent by the girls trying to interpret what the lyrics mean to Coach as well as what it means to them. When it is sung for the last time in the novel, it is a rally cry in every sense of the word and a symbol that this team has triumphed and managed a victory greater than any state championship before their first practice session has taken place. The Wildcats in this novel have been through an ordeal greater than any perceived threat than legislators think exists, and demonstrates that, in this case, these girls will not need any more protection.
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