March Madness is here!

March Madness has begun. The play-in game was last night and the opening round starts tomorrow. Schools like Austin Peay and Mount St. Mary’s hope to slip on Cinderella’s slipper and make a run deep into the tournament, while perennial big dogs like Kansas, UCLA, and North Carolina look to add championship rings to their heavily jeweled fingers. Over the next two and a half weeks, sixty-four teams will be whittled to one. Many get to play, but only one team gets to cut down the net. Basketball games will dominate many American TV screens for awhile and while we definitely recommend watching the games, take a gander at some of the excellent college basketball histories available at the Austin Public Library.

John Feinstein
Last Dance: Behind the Scenes at the Final Four

A Season on the Brink: A Year with Bob Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers

Eddie Einhorn
How March Became Madness: How the NCAA Tournament Became the Greatest Sporting Event in America

Billy Packer
Fifty Years of the Final Four: Golden Moments of the NCAA Basketball Tournament

Pamela Grundy
Shattering the Glass: The Remarkable History of Women's Basketball

The following two titles are not histories per se, rather they are biographies from two of the game’s coaching pillars. Wooden and Smith recall their basketball lives and pepper their narratives with life lessons that seemingly only come from seasoned coaches.

John Wooden
Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court

Dean Smith
The Carolina Way: Leadership Lessons from a Life in Coaching