It’s starting to feel like everyone has a book club these days.
Think musician Dua Lipa, influencer Morgann Book, actor Reese Witherspoon and broadcaster Oprah — just to name a few.
But the latest book club trend is happening somewhere you might not expect: professional athletes are organizing book clubs for their teammates.
In the NBA, the San Antonio Spurs players Victor Wembanyama and Harrison Barnes have a book club and are trying to get more team members to join, according to a video on the league’s YouTube channel.
The NHL’s San Jose Sharks also have a book club on the go, composed of Will Smith, Macklin Celebrini, Tyler Toffoli and Ty Dellandrea, and it’s become a bit of a running joke that none of the players will reveal what they’re reading.
Book clubs are also a bonding activity for athletes of the PWHL and the WNBA — including the Toronto Sceptres, Montreal Victoire, Toronto Tempo and New York Liberty.
“A lot of us really love reading,” said Toronto Sceptres forward Claire Dalton on an episode of The Next Chapter, recorded in February of this year.
She previously played for the Montreal Victoire and was part of the team’s book club, so it was “just sort of natural” to bring it to Toronto, she said.
Dalton started the book club with the team’s goalie Raygan Kirk, who also had one on her team in college as a way to debrief recent reads and unwind with her teammates.
“I would have loved to do it last year, but as a rookie, I wasn’t going to kind of come up and say, ‘Let’s do this,’” she said.
The Sceptres’ book club met over coffee during the season, combing Google and Reddit for prompts for their conversations, said Kirk. Their books have included Gone Before Goodbye by Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben, The Heir Apparent by Rebecca Armitage and Palm Villa by Ashley Hartley.
At the time of the interview, which was during the regular season, the Sceptres had about 15 players participating in the club. (There have since been many shakeups with free agency and expansion in the offseason, so we’ll see how much of that carries over to next year.)
A way for an expansion team to bond
The Tempo’s book club was also inspired by another team, said guard Kia Nurse on an episode of The Next Chapter that will air in the fall. Nurse knew that Nyara Sabally, her teammate who had played with the New York Liberty for the last few seasons, was a big reader, and they brought the idea of a book club to the rest of the squad. Six or seven players wanted in.
The Toronto Tempo is new to the WNBA as of this season, so the team was formed through an expansion draft, free agency and the entry draft. Team activities like the book club offer ways for the team to build their off-court chemistry.
“If anything has been prevalent in sport, and in basketball specifically, in the last two or three years, it’s this power of friendship,” said Nurse. “You watch these teams win championships and they are just so connected and so together and they just enjoy being around one another. A book club is the perfect way to kind of start that.”
Nurse has loved getting to better understand how her teammates think through their conversations about the books.
“With books and characters, one of the beautiful parts of it is that they can mean different things to different people,” she said.
“So sometimes I’m like, ‘Oh, we’re on the same page.’ And other times I’m like, ‘We are not on the same page with this one…’ I think those discussions are really fun.”
The Tempo’s first book club book was the thriller It Should Have Been You by Andrea Mara. Because they spend so much time together travelling, it wasn’t hard to schedule the first discussion as they were en route to a game.
“We all gathered in the front of the plane around a table and I brought two dozen Tim Horton’s donuts,” said Nurse. “That was my contribution.”
Reading as an escape for athletes
Nurse has been a lifelong reader and says that reading is the “perfect” escape as an athlete. It also allows her to define her identity as something else in addition to athletics.
“I know for me personally, and for a lot of professional athletes, and athletes that play at a high level, it becomes such a massive part of your identity that winning and losing and accomplishments … All of that stuff kind of really weighs heavy on you,” she said.
“And for me, books are like the perfect escape. It’s a way to just go into a different world and be able to see different characters, maybe resonate with some characters.”
The impact of these teams talking about their book clubs is huge. The social media video that first mentioned the Sceptres’ book club has more than 38,000 views, and had so much fan interest that they’ve been posting which books the team is reading so that fans can read along.
Bringing in the community
The posts even sparked the idea of a community event for The Children’s Book Bank, a nonprofit organization that provides free books and literacy programs at locations across Toronto.
“We loved seeing [the Toronto Sceptres] publicly promoting reading as something that was fun and collective,” said Karly-Lynne Scott, The Children’s Book Bank’s communications director. She then reached out to the team to see if they’d want to collaborate on an event, which then became Sceptres Storytime.
At the April 7 event, goalies Kirk and Jessie McPherson read Breaking The Ice, a picture book about iconic goalie Manon Rhéaume to about 50 children. They then participated in a Q&A with Erin Silver, author of Women’s Hockey Fanbook, a nonfiction book for younger readers about the sport.
“Immediately, all the kids went from our event down to our book bank and got another book of their own choice — and they were all interested in hockey books,” said Scott. “It just really shows that when you’re able to spark an interest in something, that can lead into wanting to read more, wanting to learn more.”
For Scott and The Children’s Book Bank, it’s really important to provide diverse reading role models to kids to encourage them to pick up reading as a hobby.
“Stereotypes position academics and athletics as somehow in opposition,” said Scott. “That’s obviously not true, but those kinds of attitudes can really impact how children see their own relationship to reading. So they may not view themselves as readers if they don’t fit a certain vision of what that looks like.
“By bringing in people like Raygan and Jessie, it just shows that anyone’s a reader, and that reading is cool and fun.”
