Kirkus
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How an all-deaf football team from Southern California beat the odds to become state champions. Fuller’s beat as San Francisco bureau chief for the New York Times included reporting on hard-hitting “heavy stuff” like in-state natural disasters, mass shootings, and poverty. Yet when he ran across the story of the Cubs, a football team from the California School for the Deaf, Riverside, he felt called to investigate. “This team’s journey, a tale of belonging and excellence, was the story I wanted to write,” he notes. “It felt like a salve at a time of such turmoil for the country.” In 2022, Fuller temporarily gave up his bureau chief position and moved to Riverside, where he followed the team for one extraordinary season when the team “wanted to prove that being deaf on the gridiron gave them an edge.” Watching games and immersing himself in interviews conducted through American Sign Language interpreters, he came to know the players and their community. He also learned about the eight-man game the Cubs played—which some called the purest form of football—while observing how team members, though often physically smaller than those they played, relied on inborn gifts like speed, agility, and their ability to understand their world through heightened powers of observation. What makes Fuller’s book such a page-turner—and very much a story for a wide audience beyond sports enthusiasts—is its deep involvement with the Cubs as people. From the first chapter, the author makes it clear that his story is not just about a winning team, but about human resilience and the players who exemplified it—e.g., Phillip Castaneda, an unhoused student who dazzled on the field with quickness, and Felix Gonzalez, who broke his leg just before the playoffs that the Cubs ultimately won in his honor. An uplifting book about triumphing over adversity. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
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New York Times reporter Fuller debuts with a stirring account of how the football team from the California School for the Deaf, Riverside rocketed to a state championship in 2022. The start of the 2021 season looked inauspicious for the Riverside Cubs, who were out of shape from the pandemic and fresh off eight consecutive losing seasons. The Cubs surprised even themselves by winning their first game in a 68–0 blowout against a hearing school. The victory was no fluke; the Cubs went undefeated before losing the championship game 74–22 against Los Angeles’s Faith Baptist Contenders. The loss steeled the Cubs’ determination, and they racked up another undefeated run during their 2022 season, culminating in a rousing 80–26 championship victory against Faith Baptist that Fuller recounts in breathless detail. The heart of the uplifting story lies in Fuller’s moving portraits of the student athletes. For instance, he describes how a running back attended school while living out of his father’s car and how a wide receiver almost quit the game after playing on a Pop Warner team where he was berated by his coach for not following instructions he couldn’t hear. As far as underdog stories go, this one is a surefire crowd-pleaser. Agent: Jane Dystel, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Aug.)

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

T his thoroughly reported story is officially about a high-school football team whose members are Deaf. But in the skillful hands of Fuller, the San Francisco bureau chief for the New York Times, it’s also about the evolution of attitudes toward and treatment of people with hearing challenges. In 2021, the football team at the state-run California School for the Deaf, the Riverside Cubs, were undefeated, successfully using sign language to communicate with each other across the field under the direction of their Deaf coach and advocate, Keith Adams. Fuller notes that for every 1,000 births in the U.S., two babies are diagnosed with some hearing loss, and onetenth of those are profoundly deaf. Should they be forced to go to mainstream schools and speak, or should they go to schools where they can learn and use sign language? The latter, definitely. As Fuller notes, studies show the most significant contributor to happiness is relationships with other people, and sports is a great arena for such connections. As Fuller tucks in many fascinating tidbits about deafness and community past and present, he offers cautious optimism about the future.