Fearless Firsts: Athletes Who Changed the Game: 50+ Athletes Who Overcame the Odds

While there are a lot of collective sports biographies, like Sourcebooks 100 Athletes Who Shaped Sports, and 100 Baseball Legends, Allen's Girls Race!,
and Stabler's Kid Athletes, I haven't seen one that focused on athletes from a wide variety of backgrounds and sports that were firsts. This is a great idea, because it allows for a lot of inclusion, but also is a reminded of how recently some of these athletes were "first", because the playing field is still not even.

There were some athletes with whom I was familiar, like tennis player Althea Gibson, athletic polymath Babe Didrickson Zaharias, and baseball player Toni Stone (who is the subject of the fantastic new picture book by Karen L. Swanson, Swinging into History: Toni Stone: Big-League Baseball's First Woman Player, this covered some that I hadn't heard of. I'd heard of Olympic swimmer Sammy Lee, for example, but not his friend Vicki Manolo Draves. Since I don't follow car racing, I didn't realize how groundbreaking Indy 500 driver Janet Guthrie or drag racer Shirley Muldowney were. I should have known about Marla Runyon, the first legally blind Olympic runner, and now might pick up her book No Finish Line. That's the reason I love to see books like this; my students and I might not be interested in every single person, but there's always one or two entries that encourage us to get more information.