1.) John Edgar Wideman’s tremendous lyricism and form-breaking style resembles the playground game he loves and played until sixty.  Mr. Wideman grew up in Pennsylvania, and after an All-Ivy League career at University of Pennsylvania, attended Oxford on a Rhode’s scholarship.  He’s the author of ten novels and at least as many works of non-fiction.  Check out Hoop Roots and the Homewood Trilogy.

2.) Ernest Hemingway, ran track, and played football and water polo in high school, and famously claimed, “there are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”  Given the chance would he have added fishing to his list?  I recommend The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea.

3.) I’m cheating with this one.  John Updike suffered psoriasis, a skin disease that no doubt curtailed his athletic ambitions.  Still, nobody could write about baseball, or understand so intimately the plight of the has-been high school star, paralyzed by his own adult mediocrity, without at least possessing that competitive inclination.  Check out Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu and the Rabbit Angstrom novels.

4.) Jenifer Levin, once a competitive swimmer, writes with an insider’s passion both about the athlete’s baffling drive and the messy lives that meet them outside the pool or the gym.  Levin’s books profoundly illustrate that a sports novel is never only, or even mostly, about sport, but about people.  Check out The Sea of Light and Water Dancer.

5.) It seems fitting to end the day with The Art of Fielding (publishing in paperback tomorrow!) by Chad Harbach, a former high school player and professional baseball writer. The game, he reveals, is a perfect metaphor for the transcendent potential of all human pursuits: “You loved it because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about the Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.”

Mary Volmer is a former NCAA Division I basketball player and the founding Director of the Saint Mary’s College Honors Program. Her first novel Crown of Dust, published in paperback in November 2011.