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Fall River Dreams by Bill Reynolds is a book that will make you fall asleep and keep you up all night at the same time.  At parts you feel as if you can’t read another page, for basketball politics are not what you want to be reading.  But then Durfee plays a game and all the hard work they’ve put in at practice is tested.

The book follows a Durfee basketball team over two seasons and even though this may be considered a basketball book it’s not.  It should be classified as a history book, for I know more about the towns Durfee played than Durfee basketball itself.  But despite the long chapters about the politics and history of basketball towns the parts that displayed Durfee basketball itself were the best.

Durfee is a basketball school with a long tradition of winning, where great players are made and great games are played. The games the book examines (from the early 1990s) were always close, always keeping you on the edge of your seat to see if Durfee had made the last shot or lost it all.

Chris Herren comes from a long line of Durfee stars.  He’s the top player at Durfee and has very big shoes to fill after his brother won back to back state championships two years before him.  But the pressure doesn’t bother him. Instead what bothers him is his coach Skippy Karam.

Skippy Karam has been the Durfee coach for decades and is Fall River’s hero.  Every year he guides Durfee on a journey through the season and into the state playoffs, anything less would be a failure. Karam and Herren have a complicated relationship, times have changed and players don’t respect their coach as much, especially the best on the team.  So Karam yells at Herren, and Herren yells back.  They push each other to the brink and sometimes over. It’s an uneasy relationship that neither can fix but must tolerate.  The fighting is entertaining, I admit, and the way Chris talks to his coach is unheard of.

Though they don’t like each other they do work with the other, making the team and themselves better as a player and a coach.  The guys on the team stick together, because they have to if they wanted to survive Karam.  But even though these guys are amazing basketball players they’re still teens.  Still stupid and foolish kids that party on the weekends and neglect schoolwork.  It’s hard to imagine such careless people but it’s true.  Fall River treats their basketball players like rock stars and that’s how they act.  Basketball player by day,  partier by night: that’s always how Durfee basketball players have always been.

Fall River Dreams is a good read if you don’t mind useless historical facts about Massachusetts towns and the people in them.  If you have the patience and you like basketball I would definitely recommend this book, for it’s high school basketball in its finest.  Any basketball player would be able to relate to these kids, and the games are compelling in every way possible.  The journey Durfee goes through is truly inspirational and just shows no matter what you have, or where you’re from, if you have passion you can do it.