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Set against a backdrop of social change during the 1970s, State is a compelling first-person account of what it was like to live through both traditional gender discrimination in sports and the joy of the very first days of equality - or at least the closest that one high school girls' basketball team ever came to it.In 1975, freshman Melissa Isaacson - along with a group of other girls who'd spent summers with their noses pressed against the fences of Little League ball fields, unable to play - entered Niles West High School in suburban Chicago with one goal: make a team, any team. For Missy, that turned out to be the basketball team.Title IX had passed just three years earlier, prohibiting gender discrimination in education programs or activities, including athletics. As a result, states like Illinois began implementing varsity competition - and state tournaments - for girls' high school sports.At the time, Missy and her teammates didn't really understand the legislation. All they knew was they finally had opportunities - to play, to learn, to sweat, to lose, to win - and an identity: they were athletes. They were a team.And in 1979, they became state champions.With the intimate insights of the girl who lived it, the pacing of a born storyteller, and the painstaking reporting of a veteran sports journalist, Isaacson chronicles one high school team's journey to the state championship. In doing so, Isaacson shows us how a group of "tomboys" found themselves and each other, and how basketball rescued them from their collective frustrations and troubled homes, and forever altered the course of their lives.