A while ago we promised something on Melissa King's hoops memoir She's Got Next.

It's probably worth your time (and it's pretty short, too) if you take any interest in rec-league or playground ball; if you coach pre-teens, or wonder what it's like to coach them; or if you like brief, moving and well-written memoirs. It's also oddly bisected-- it feels like reading two books.

The first two-thirds describe King's Arkansas childhood, her post-collegiate aspiration to move to a big city and play more ball, and her stints in Chicago and California, where she feels somewhat lost in urban environments but comes to love life in various playgrounds and gyms.

These pages feel somewhat scattered, as if an editor had pared them down, but they've also got cool scenes and anecdotes from pickup games: King overcomes her own prejudices, watches other folks try to overcome theirs, and hits some big shots. If you like John Edgar Wideman's poetic prose about playground ball, you'll probably like King's more concise, less ambitious, work on some of the same themes.

The best part for me, though, came when she moved back to Arkansas and began coaching fourth-grade after-school ball. These chapters give her more than one continuing character; subplots about her kids' lives rather than her own; and concerns for people who aren't herself.

They also yield funny remarks: "there is no outside shot in fourth-grade basketball," which means that when one of her charges sinks a long jumper, she has to spend some time and emotion telling that child not to take that shot whenever she's open. (Some fans of the pro game may know the feeling.) From a background of not much (her Bible appears to be the Baffled Parents' Guide) King becomes an emotionally engaged, and an appropriate, afterschool coach for these kids.

King appears to be one of those participation-is-everything athletes who either doesn't much enjoy watching a game in which she's not involved, or doesn't much enjoy writing about such games afterwards: she shares Wideman's unease about well-paid NBA'ers, and other than a pleasant aside about Holdsclaw, doesn't say much about NCAA women's ball, let alone the W. If it didn't happen to King, it's not in her book: that's not a problem, it's just the kind of book she wrote. I suspect her next book will be a non-basketball memoir, rather than a non-memoir basketball book: she writes well enough that I might read it anyway.