An interview with Stacy Barnett Mozer

 

An interview with Stacy Barnett Mozer

3/30/2016

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Know any athletic girls, ages 8-14 who want a good role model and a source of inspiration? I urge you to buy them copies of The Sweet Spot, by Stacy Mozer.

When thirteen-year-old Sam Barrette’s baseball coach tells her that her attitude's holding her back, she wants to hit him in the head with a line drive. Why shouldn’t she have an attitude? As the only girl playing in the 13U league, she’s had to listen to boys and people in the stands screaming things like “Go play softball,” all season, just because she’s a girl. Her coach barely lets her play, even though she’s one of the best hitters on the team.All stakes now rest on Sam’s performance at baseball training camp. But the moment she arrives, miscommunication sets the week up for potential disaster. Placed at the bottom with the weaker players, she will have to work her way up to A league, not just to show Coach that she can be the best team player possible, but to prove to herself that she can hold a bat with the All-Star boys.

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photo courtesy The Greenwich Time

I caught up with author Stacy Mozer recently and got to ask her about The Sweet Spot, her book recently published by Spellbound River Press.

Stacy is a third grade teacher and a mom. She started writing books when a class of students told her that there was no way that a real author who wrote real books could possibly revise their work as much as she asked them to revise. She proved them wrong and has been revising her own work ever since. 

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Me: Why does your main character want to play baseball? Why not softball?

Stacy: Sam plays baseball because I grew up as a Mets fan and a baseball lover. My favorite movie growing up was Blue Skies Again, a story about a girl who gets on to a minor league team. Softball is a great sport, but it isn’t the same as baseball. The pitching is different, the fielding is different. And just because you are good at one sport it, doesn’t mean that you are good at the other. When I was doing research I played around with the idea that Sam was at a camp and forced to play softball so she convinced a bunch of girls to form their own baseball team. The expert that I spoke to said it would never work because when she was in high school she convinced a number of her softball friends to try out for baseball. She was the only one who made the team.

Me: Is Sam’s character based on a real person, a composite of people, or is she completely fictitious?

Stacy: Sam is a composite of girls I’ve had in my class over the years who have fought their way on the playing field with the boys at recess. She also has some of me in her too. Her snarkiness is definitely me.

Me: Have you got another book in the pipeline?

Stacy: Book 2 will be coming out from Spellbound River this time next year. It’s call The Perfect Trip and it tells the story of the rest of Sam’s summer and new obstacles she will face in her baseball career. 

Play ball, girls!

 

Not all girls want to play the sports usually reserved for them. Unfortunately, girls face a lot of resistance breaking into sports that are traditionally in the males' domain. While this resistance might not be fun for girls who face it, it makes for great middle grade reading.

Spring is here, and the metallic ping of aluminum bats hitting baseballs rings through the land. Most of those bats are swung by boys, but there are some girls who'd rather hit a hard ball than a softball.

The Sweet Spot, Stacy Barnett Mozer, is a great book for athletic middle school and upper elementary girls. Thirteen-year-old Sam Barrette’s baseball coach tells her that her attitude's holding her back, but how can she not have an attitude when she has to listen to boys and people in the stands screaming things like “Go play softball,” all season, just because she's the only girl playing in the 13U league. Lovely and sensitive, this book will help guide girls through the difficulties of asserting themselves and becoming leaders in a man's world.


The Sweet Spot comes out in a new edition published by Spellbound River today. I'll be interviewing the author on this blog next week. If this book appeals to you, enter a giveaway at Rafflecopter.

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The Girl Who Threw Butterflies, by Mick Cochrane, is another book about a girl trying to play baseball. After her father's death in a car accident, eighth grader, Molly Williams decides to join the baseball team and show off the knuckleball her father taught her how to throw. Although the author does a little more telling than showing, this book also gives a fair picture of a girl overcoming hardships, both on the field and in her personal life.

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And, just because not every girl wants to play baseball, I'm including Dairy Queen by Catherine Gilbert Murdock. This novel tells the story of fifteen-year-old D. J. Schwenk, the only daughter of a farmer in Red Bend, Wisconsin who loves football so much that he names his cows after football players. D.J. knows a lot about football because of her brothers, but when she decides that she wants to join the team, the opposition nearly sacks her courage

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 Let us hope that the opposition to girls in male dominated sports truly becomes an historical issue soon.

In the Footsteps of heroes

 

​When New Mexico’s National Guard 200th and 515th Coast Artillery landed in the Philippines in the early 1940s, they thought they’d landed in paradise. Coming from an arid, landlocked state, few had ever seen beaches or tropical forests. Little did they know that it would soon become hell on earth. 

On the day after Japan bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, the Japanese invaded the Philippines. They captured the capital, Manila, in less than a month. American and Filipino defenders retreated onto the Bataan Peninsula, where they held out for three months despite dwindling supplies of food, medicine and ammunition and no support or resupply by naval or air forces. By April 9, starvation and disease had become so crippled the troops that the force of approximately 75,000 surrendered.

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​The Japanese rounded up the surrendered soldiers and forced them to march some 65 miles in what became known as the Bataan Death March. The men, divided into groups of approximately 100, typically took around five days to march from the southern end of the Bataan Peninsula, to San Fernando where they were loaded in to cattle cars to complete the journey to prisoner-of-war camps. Exact figures are unknown, but it is believed that thousands of troops died because of the brutality of their captors, who starved and beat the marchers, and bayoneted those too weak to walk. More than 1,400 of those involved in the march were New Mexicans. 

Shaking the hand of Bataan survivor William Overmeier, 2007

The Bataan Memorial Death March is a commemoration held every spring at White Sands Missile Range in Southern New Mexico. Marchers, many of whom are members of the military, complete either the 26.2-mile or the 14.2 mile course. Some carry heavy packs. All do it to honor those involved in the original march. Although their numbers are dwindling, some survivors attend this event. Now in their 90s, time is accomplishing what their Japanese captors could not. 

I have done the march five times before: twice completing the short course and three times completing the long. I've accompanied friends, family members, Boy Scouts, and members of Team RWB, an organization that uses exercise and social activities to help veterans reintegrate into civilian life. This year the march is on March 20. This time I have trained and am leading ten others, including four 8th graders, their parents, and other staff members from the middle school at which I work. Five of us are doing the full course. Another six (including me) will complete the short course. 

​I’ll let you know how it goes.