HOOKED ON HOOPS: Lessons Learned from a Lifetime in Basketball Paperback – April 1, 2024

Hooked on Hoops: Lessons Learned from a Lifetime in Basketball is Mike Halstead’s memoir of his formative years as a promising young basketball player in the 1950s and 1960s and his lengthy career as a high school teacher and coach. Halstead explains how his family, basketball coaches, teachers, and others he met along the way influenced him, teaching him about humility and making him a better man. In the final chapters of Hooked on Hoops, he relates the stories of some of the student athletes he coached and mentored who went on to successful careers in a variety of fields. Relying on both personal anecdotes and twentieth-century milestones in the history of the game and sprinkled liberally with photographs, Hooked on Hoops illustrates Halstead's deeply held conviction that basketball is a metaphor for life.Halstead's first book, Mattie: The Life and Times of Martha Ellen Calvert, was published in 2014. Honoring his paternal grandparents, Will and Mattie Halstead, it provides a glimpse of the personalities of working-class West Virginians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Read more