Author Interview - Alaska Hoops: Tips and Tales from the Girls' Locker Room by Becky Crabtree

Describe your book in five words or less.
Guide to coaching girls

How did the ideas for your books come to you?
Life - the book is factual.

What is the hardest part of writing for you? What's the easiest?
The hardest is the discipline required to write regularly. The easiest for me is reliving the incidents I write about.

What's next for you? Are you currently working on or have plans for future projects?
I have been collecting my thoughts into essays about the trials and tribulations of the village school principal.

Why did you choose to write for specific genre?
Exposure to coaches and athletes interested in girls sports as led me to think I understand their perspective and can write for them.

What's it like hearing that readers are eagerly awaiting your book's release date?
Ha, I don't know. I had several friends and family members who were anxious, but only a few.

What is one question that you've always wanted to be asked in an interview? How would you answer that question?
I would like to be asked what I left out of the book. I left out several essays regarding social issues within a team, bullying and sexual preference differences, for instance.

What was your road to publications like?
I wrote a letter of inquiry on New Year's Eve and a kind publisher responded with some advice, which I followed. After a year, I wrote back and she decided to take on my book!

Becky's Bio:
Becky Crabtree - Basketball CoachB
ecky Crabtree was born in rural West Virginia and grew up during the 1960s, a time when girls were not always treated fairly anywhere, but to her, especially on the basketball court. In 1970, two years before Title IX gender equity legislation was enacted, Becky Hatcher Crabtree graduated from high school. The inequity of sport for girls, particularly on the basketball court, influenced the rest of her life and the opportunities she fights to offer her students.

An educator for the past 34 years, in West Virginia, Guam, and for the past sixteen school terms, on the North Slope of Alaska, Crabtree has coached for most of the last three decades. The game of basketball is as beloved to her as it is to the residents of the villages of Alaska.

She believes that the women of Alaska need their stories told and that basketball rocks. She has contributed articles to The Pacific Daily Mail and Alaska Newpapers.
Currently a coach, teacher, and principal, Becky lives in Atqasuk, Alaska. She and husband Roger have three daughters and three gradnchildren.