Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook. It offers a rich and unflinching portrait of a coach, his players, and the West Bank, a community where it’s difficult-but not impossible-to rise above the chaos, discover purpose, and find a way out. What is sure to be a classic work of sports journalism, Across the River is a necessary investigation into the serious realities of young athletes in struggling neighborhoods: gentrification, eviction, mental health issues, the drug trade, and gun violence. In Across the River, award-winning sports journalist Kent Babb follows the Karr football team through its 2019 season as Brown and his team-perhaps the scrappiest and most rebellious group in the program’s history-vie to again succeed on and off the field. An epidemic of gun violence plagues New Orleans and its surrounding communities and has claimed many innocent lives, including Brown’s former star quarterback, Tollette “Tonka” George, shot near a local gas station. For years, this football program has brought glory to Algiers, winning three consecutive state championships and sending dozens of young men to college on football scholarships.Īlthough he is preparing for a fourth title, head coach Brice Brown is focused on something else: keeping his players alive. Short on hope but big on dreams, its mostly poor and marginalized residents find joy on Friday nights when the Cougars of Edna Karr High School take the field. One of the slogans at Karr is “give ‘em the real.” As we enter another football season in the South, it’s important to remember the power of the game in the lives of the kids who play it.On the west bank of the Mississippi lies the New Orleans neighborhood of Algiers. It’s about so much beyond what happens on the field. It’s about coaches struggling with those kids and with one another. It’s about young men trying to navigate lives far more violent and complicated than most of us ever have to deal with. That’s the subject of “Across the River,” the new book by this week's SouthBound guest, Kent Babb.īabb is a sportswriter for the Washington Post, and after writing about Karr High for the newspaper, he went back and spent the season with the team for his book. And at Edna Karr High School in Algiers, there’s a football coach trying to not just win games but save the lives of his young players. It’s part of New Orleans but not really of the city.

On the far bank of the Mississippi River, across from the French Quarter, there’s a neighborhood called Algiers. But the city has hard times between storms, too.

Across the river kent babb