The death of high school basketball star Rob Washington in a car accident affects the lives of his close friend Andy, who was driving the car and many others in the school.

Mitch is a journalist at his high school, and he has no athletic abilities. He starts to follow a mysterious new football player named Angel. Can Mitch find out the truth to who he really is?

Mick wants to be a football star, unlike his father who failed. So he starts taking “gym candy,” or steroids. He begins to achieve his dreams, but the side effects are devastating. 

While trying to prove that he is good enough to on his high school's varsity basketball team, Nick must also deal with his parents' divorce and erratic behavior of a troubled classmate who lives across the street.

Intellectually and athletically gifted, TJ, a multiracial, adopted teenager, shuns organized sports and the gung-ho athletes at his high school, until he agrees to form a swimming team and recruits some of the school's less popular students.

Louie, a high school senior in a small Idaho town, learns about sportsmanship, love, and death as he matures into manhood.

While training for a triathlon, seventeen-year-old Bo attends an anger management group at school which leads him to examine his relationship with his father.

In six tense, exciting short stories, featuring new voices as well as characters from Crutcher's acclaimed popular novels, athletes face up to more than sports. These are tales of love and death, of bigotry and heroism, of real people doing the best that they can, even when that best is not enough.  

Jerome Foxworthy -- the Jayfox to his friends -- likes to think he can handle anything. He handled growing up without a father, being the first black kid in school, and he sure can handle a basketball. Then Jerome meets Bix Rivers -- mysterious and moody, but a great athlete. So Jerome decides to teach Bix his game. He can tell that Bix has the talent. All he's got to do is learn the right moves.... 

Twelve-year-old Paul, who lives in the shadow of his football hero brother Erik, fights for the right to play soccer despite his near blindness, and slowly begins to remember the incident that damaged his eyesight.