Interview with Barbara Carroll Roberts
Barbara Carroll Roberts grew up in northern California. She holds a B.A. in English from Occidental College and Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Hamline University. Her first novel, Nikki On the Line was a 2019 Parents’ Choice Recommended award winner. Roberts has two grown children and lives in northern Virginia with her husband, one ridiculously energetic Springer spaniel, and two cats.
Terry Horstman, (executive editor of the Under Review) started playing basketball as a child in Minneapolis and grew up to become the all-time lowest scoring player in the history of Minnesota high school hoops. His writing has been published by The Growler, Eater: Twin Cities, USA TODAY Sports Media Group, Unplugg’d. Horstman has his MFA in creative writing from Hamline University.
The following interview was conducted at the offices of the Creative Writing Programs at Hamline University during Alumni Weekend of the 2019 Summer Residency of Hamline’s low-residency MFAC program (writing for children and young adults).
Terry Horstman: Thank you for sitting down with me, Barbara, and thanks for coming out for Alumni Weekend. We were connected through the great Peter Pearson, another alum of Hamline University’s low-residency MFAC (writing for children and young adults) program. As a basketball fanatic, I was immediately drawn to the content of your YA novel Nikki On The Line. As a point of reference, let’s begin this interview with an excerpt from the book:
I was in the zone. Flowing with the game, feeling where my teammates were moving like there were strings between us, seeing the whole floor, all the girls, like a pattern, like a dance. The ball falling from my hand, booming off the floor, rising back up to skim my fingertips, boom, shh, boom, shh, boom, sure and steady as a pulse. The swish and rattle of the hoop. The shouts, the hands raised high for a pass. The grins, the fist-bumps. The joy.
I could have played like that forever. (p 9)
Terry Horstman: Nikki’s dedication to her shooting routines really sparked my imagination. I grew up playing basketball. I wasn’t nearly as good as Nikki is as a 13-year-old, but I had the similar experience of desperately wishing I was better, and desperately wishing I was taller. That character trait of hers had me wanting to call my parents and ask if I could come over and shoot in the driveway again. I know from the piece in the Washington Post that you were fed up with not being able to find sports books with female protagonists for your daughter. At what point in your writing life did you decide that your first book would be a sports book with a female protagonist?
Barbara Carroll Roberts: I played sports pre-Title IX. Obviously, then there were no sports books (for girls) and at the time it didn’t even occur to me that there weren’t any books about girls that played sports, because there just weren’t. It wasn’t until I was really working on this and thinking about this, that there weren’t very many books for Helen (my daughter) to read, and that there weren’t many books for me to read either. Maybe that’s why I didn’t like reading as a kid. I did not like reading at all until I was halfway through high school and I finally had a really good teacher.
Our children are four years apart and they both love all kinds of sports. I think it was just that Wesley grew up with Matt Christopher books. I mean, he just gorged on kids playing sports, and I just figured there’d be lots of books for Helen too. But there weren’t. That’s when I decided to write one.
It seemed to me like, in the boys’ books, the protagonist was always the sports star. Obviously, the majority of people who play sports are not the star. And as you move up in sports there are fewer and fewer stars. All those guys who sit on the bench in the NBA, they’ve always been the best player on every single team they’ve ever played on before the pros.
TH: That reminds me of a quote by Jerry West in Basketball: a Love Story that came out this year. He said, “People always show these winning locker rooms, guys celebrating. There are more stories in the losing locker room than there will ever be in a winning locker room.” I remember those Matt Christopher books growing up and it never even occurred to me that I was always reading about the best player.
BCR: Exactly. So everybody has to deal with this. Unless you’re Kevin Durant, or LeBron James, or Maya Moore, everybody has had to deal with this. It seemed to me that that was a way more interesting thing to write about than someone who is a big star and is playing to get a scholarship.
TH: What are your hopes for sports books for girls?
BCR: I hope there will be more and more books like this for girls. And I have been pleased to see more recently.
There have been a lot of people who were excited to see this book. Because it’s about a girl who loves her sport, and that’s what I wanted to write. I didn’t want to write a book about the mean girls. I didn’t want to write a book about how to make your ponytail look good for the boys who were watching. That is what were finding in the books out there.
I wanted to write a book about a girl who loves her sport and is totally invested in her sport.
TH: I fell in love with basketball when I was really young. My dad took me to Timberwolves’ games and they were awful, but I still loved it. The Orlando Magic were all the rage back then. Jordan had just retired and I was seven years old, so the first player I loved was Penny Hardaway. He was the first person I remember my dad describing as a ‘beautiful basketball player.’ That phrase always stuck with me and the memory of it made Nikki’s description of her best friend and teammate, Adria, just jump off the page.
[Adria] stood out on the basketball court no matter what she was doing. Her long, long arms and legs made her look like she was flying over the court instead of running. Like maybe gravity didn’t apply to her. Even my mom, who was clueless about sports, said Adria made basketball beautiful.
Have you always seen basketball as something beautiful?
BCR: No, I used to hate basketball.
[laughter]
BCR: I played sports pre-Title IX when there were no youth sports leagues for girls. The reason I even played was because when I was in junior high, the PE teachers would say to those of us who were good at sports, ‘do you want to be in sports class next year when you get to high school?’ And we all kind of went, ‘well we don’t know what that is, but sure, whatever.’
They had just started having competitive girls sports in my high school district. The last period of the day we just played whatever we were told to play. I really loved field hockey and I stayed with field hockey. We were only allowed in the gym to play basketball if the boys weren’t using it. Otherwise we were out on the blacktop. We were terrible. I mean we had one coach for three teams. The only girls who knew anything about basketball were the ones who had brothers who taught them to play in the driveway. Most of us were just dreadful and never got any better.
I never really liked basketball. But every single boyfriend I ever had, and then my husband, all loved basketball. My son started playing and he really liked it. When our daughter started playing, she just really took to it, and it was like, okay this is what we’re doing now and I might as well like it.
I also have to say, my kids went to a public high school that had excellent programs for boys lacrosse and girls basketball. They always graduate Division I players. There were two girls who played ahead of my daughter, Helen, and went on to play at Villanova. One of the girls now plays for the Connecticut Sun. Jasmine Thomas. She’s a really, really good point guard. So these are the girls who go to this high school. If Helen had been going to any other high school, she would have been playing varsity as a freshman. She didn’t play varsity until she was a junior and she didn’t start until she was a senior because she was behind all these amazing players.
I don’t want to say this book is about my daughter, because it is not about my daughter. But, all those hours Nikki spends in the driveway, Helen would literally shovel snow off the driveway and go out there and shoot. It really taught me that if you have a high goal, you have to be willing to really, really work towards it. The kids who are successful that’s what they do. No matter how good you are. All these girls who were really good, natural athletes, they all worked as hard as she did.
TH: Did you come to enjoy watching basketball with so many basketball fans in your life?
BCR: It really wasn’t until my kids started playing. My husband always coached. I think because I was watching, and he was coaching, and I was paying attention, I started learning about it. I started learning what was really going on and appreciating it.
The coach at my kids’ high school was who taught them how to shoot. All these girls were just really beautiful shooters. I really did come to appreciate the difference in having the beautiful fluid shot versus just throwing the ball up. So [watching] that and learning what was happening on the court, is how I finally came to appreciate the sport.
TH: You mentioned that Nikki is absolutely not your daughter. Is she based on anyone else?
BCR: Nikki’s a mixture of a lot of people. And when you’re writing, every character is you to some extent. Some of the things, like this ability to set a goal, and to work and work and work at it no matter what, I definitely took that from my daughter. I’ve never seen anyone like her for being able to do that and I wanted to write about a character who had that kind of grit and determination. I still find it extremely interesting. Helen’s headed towards medical school now, so she definitely still has that grit.
TH: Were you able to find many other sports books written for girls either as reference or inspiration?
BCR: There were two. The one that I found first was Dairy Queen by Catherine Gilbert Murdock, which is a book I still love. In fact, I wrote my critical essay (in my application to the Hamline MFA program) on her use of setting in that book. It’s a wonderful book in all kinds of ways. But what it really does get right is that this girl is an athlete. She takes joy from the movement of her body. There is a very memorable section where she’s talking about how fun it feels to run, to just move. That struck me as very authentic. I’m not an athlete anymore, but when I was, I remember that feeling. That joy of the movement itself.
The other one, which I actually found while I was here (at Hamline) and I was working on a critical essay on sports books with heart, it’s called The Girl Who Threw Butterflies by Mick Cochrane. It’s a beautiful book. It’s about a girl whose father has died in a car accident. She and her father had a real bond established by hanging out in the backyard where she would pitch to him. He taught her how to throw a knuckleball. So she decides to tryout for the boys baseball team and makes it.
Cockrane’s use of extended metaphor is lovely. It has to do with communicating on all different levels and her loss of communication with her father and how much she misses that.
It’s just a really beautiful book. I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t read it.
There are more and more [books with this content] now. When I was searching for books for Helen there just weren’t very many.
TH: What I love about books for young readers is that there are so many entry points. A kid loves basketball, they pick up a book about basketball and realize they love reading. I also imagine a lot of kids have picked this up unaware of the science lesson they would be getting throughout, myself included. Did you know at the beginning that you’d be fusing science into this story of a young basketball player or did you discover that thread later on?
BCR: I did know that I wanted to have genetics be a part of the book in some way. Because, obviously, our genetic makeup does have a lot to do with our talent at sports. It’s not the whole thing, but it gives you a baseline. I literally took the curriculum books from my kids’ junior high and that’s where I started from to make sure I had the right level for what they’d be studying.
In the book there is a reference to a family tree project. There really were projects like that for my kids in their junior high curriculum in history. They did a family tree to see who was their first family member who came to the U.S. Luckily, we had warning, because Wesley, our biological son is four years older than our adopted daughter Helen. When Helen got to that project, I told the teacher she was just going to have to proceed with a different plan.
I also wanted to address the [overbearing nature of] parents out there who exude so much pride in their children’s athletic achievements that they tend to claim those achievements as their own. I didn’t want Nikki to be in that position. Her achievements are her achievements. They have nothing to do with her parents, exactly. That’s why I wanted her mom to be a complete non-sports person.
TH: And to contrast with Kate’s dad.
BCR: Right! And he is nowhere near as bad as a lot of sports parents out there.
TH: I did keep waiting for him to get worse. I thought Nikki and Adria’s friendship was very authentic and masterfully depicted. What were you hoping to accomplish with those two together?
BCR: I definitely wanted to show how the girls in a team come together and support each other. With Nikki and Adria, I wanted to show a genuine friendship. Maybe at times we do have these petty jealousies, things that go wrong, and misunderstandings, etc. I also wanted to show a real friendship with all its goofiness too.
TH: Speaking of goofiness, I loved all the scenes of Nikki talking to her poster of Mia McCall and how she functioned as a silent, yet helpful partner as Nikki moved through the story. Is there an origin story to those scenes?
BCR: In the writing process things just sort of happen and putting that poster on the wall just happened. You know, I asked myself ‘what would her room look like?’ Well of course she would have pictures of her favorite stars, as my children did. And having Nikki talk with her, it really helped. I don’t mean to compare myself to Phillip Pullman, but the way that he uses the demon in His Dark Materials, basically is what the internal dialogue of what the main character would be, but she gets to talk it out with this other little creature. That’s the way the poster is used so it’s not just internal dialogue. It’s imagined conversation.
TH: I thought that worked very well and was also very charming. It definitely helped me feel less weird about doing the exact same thing when I was in middle school.
BCR: I bet lots of kids do that. We certainly don’t communicate to them, but in our basement we have a FatHead on the wall of Sue Bird and another one of Steph Curry.
TH: That is awesome.
Thank you again for taking the time to sit down with me. This book was a joy that I think can touch a lot of people, regardless of their basketball acumen. I look forward to enjoying it again and wish you the best of luck with all of your future projects. We’ll be sure to keep our eyes out for them.
