Warrior Girls

Warrior Girls by Michael Sokolove

The book “Warrior Girls” by Michael Sokolove, tells two different stories of women athletes who struggled with multiple injuries and surgeries that come along with it. Like many athletes, these girls face the pressure of coaches, competition, and their own confidence battling against themselves to make it to the top. When they don’t realize how much pressure they can really undergo. “Warrior Girls” goes in depth of how much female athletes will go, even until they have ran themselves to the ground. In the first part of the book, it tells a story about a girl named Amy, who fell in love with soccer at a very young age. Her piers even saw how talented and gifted she was when playing the sport. She put so much dedication into the sport, and it almost led her straight to the top, until she tore her ACL. Amy ended up getting surgery to fix it and was determined to going back to the sport. But for her this included many pain killers and excessive amount of physical therapy. The real problem Amy had wasn’t just with her ACL it was with her consistency of trying too hard and fast to get back to where she was before, this caused her to tear her ACL multiple times after that. The second story talked about a girl named Leslie. She also was big on soccer like Amy, but on top of that she had a very competitive coach. Dorrance, her coach was fixated on fitness for his team. In her story, it showed how obsessed some coaches and different outsiders pushed all of their athletes to the extreme. This led to many of the athletes to be incredibly injured. For Leslie this meant a torn ACL five different times. After she struggled to compete and get back to the player she was once before, but only in the end she accepted that she was physically unable to compete against the others like she did before. Even though she knew she wouldn’t be the player she was before she achieved her goals differently with still striving to be successful and working her way back up gradually.

I honestly didn’t have a favorite part of the book. I enjoyed reading each and every part. This book brought up so many emotions while I was reading it because I feel like I experienced something so similar to those girls. It gave me a good example to still be patient and strive for my goals, even if they were different goals than before. 

My book relates to my iQuest project because in physical therapy ACL tears are very very common in female athletes. Also the stress of any sport can be very hard on ones body. In the book it shows how extreme an athlete is willing to go to be the best they can be and not even realize it until they have reached their consequences. It’s sad how this is very common, and all the pressure is for athletes but this book was meant to open the eyes of athletes and show them what doesn’t need to happen.

I would definitely recommend this book to my piers. Especially the ones who have already gone through injuries and who were impacted greatly by them. I wish I would have read this book earlier after my injury because it would have given myself a better outlook.