If you’ve been waiting for a book on youth, interscholastic and intercollegiate sport that honors and addresses the need for cooperation among student-athletes, parents and coaches—with a focus on what’s best for the student-athlete, welcome home.

The 2013 editions of The Quality of Effort and The Quality of Effort Workbook invite student-athletes, parents and coaches to observe and explore their unique and necessary roles in bringing about a healthy athletic experience. Reggie Marra writes through the soul of a poet-athlete-teacher-caregiver, and kid who got cut from the team he later went on to coach.

He takes us by the hand and challenges us to inquire into our own values, behaviors, and relationships within the complexity of the 21^st-Century environments in which we live, learn, work and play. If we’re willing to take up the challenge, this inquiry helps us see ourselves and all those heroes and villains out there from increasingly comprehensive and balanced perspectives.

“Preaching” only what he practices, in The Quality of Effort, Reggie Marra authentically engages each of us to become increasingly more aware of our stories—the interpretations we choose, and how they affect, and even effect, what we do next as parents, coaches, student-athletes and human beings.

While focused on and in contemporary youth, interscholastic and intercollegiate sports, Marra calls on both ancient and modern wisdom: The Consolation of Philosophy, Spiral Dynamics, Man’s Search for Meaning and the Bhagavad Gita, and invites us into the worlds of Mary Catherine Bateson and Ken Wilber; Bob Knight and Boethius; Joan Benoit Samuelson and Don Beck; and Sacred Heart High School’s 1979-1980 boys’ junior varsity basketball team.

If you’re willing to explore the questions he raises, you may find that at its core The Quality of Effort is all about your favorite topic—you.