The Girl Who Built Her Own Runway
In Maggie Vaults Over the Moon, a Kansas farm girl takes up the pole vault in a school that has never had a girl in the event. Maggie Steele is seventeen, carrying more grief than a kid should have to, and not everyone in town thinks a girl belongs near a vaulting pit. She goes up anyway.
Olympic pole vault champion Katerina Stefanidi (Rio 2016) wrote the foreword to Maggie Vaults Over the Moon. She saw her own story in Maggie's, and in the foreword she puts it plainly: "Like Maggie, our success comes from listening to the voice that whispers to us from within to get back up and try again."
Maggie is fiction. The girls she was written for are real, and her trouble is real too. When a member of the school board stands up and says he is not convinced pole vaulting is an appropriate activity for a girl, Maggie does not wait for his permission. Her grandmother believes in her. People in town go to bat for her.
Her quest is forged against gravity and against the folks who would keep her on the ground.
Fifty-four years ago this June, Title IX gave real girls the right to compete, and the case for it has only grown. Girls who play sports grow into women who lead, and they live healthier doing it. In a global survey of women executives, 94 percent of those in the C-suite had played sports (EY and espnW). The Women's Sports Foundation found that 17 percent of girls who play report moderate to high depression, against 29 percent of girls who never played.
Christine Brennan saw it early. The USA Today columnist, now author of On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women's Sports, endorsed the novel in 2012:
“This inspiring book comes along at a perfect time ... Girls who play sports and the coaches and families who support them will thoroughly enjoy Grant Overstake’s warm, uplifting story. After reading it, we’ll all wish we were pole vaulters like Maggie.”
Dr. Melissa I. White, sport psychologist and author of the Maggie Vaults Over the Moon reading guide. A former vaulter, she taught Olympic pole vaulter Bridget Williams to vault in middle school and coached her again in high school.
A lot has happened since. Maggie has become a quiet staple of the track-and-field shelf. CITIUS Mag named it to its list of 100 books every runner and track fan should read, the only title on it about a field event. Kirkus called it "a fine YA novel about perseverance in sports and in life."
In 2021, Grain Valley Publishing released a Second Edition with a foreword by Olympic gold medalist Katerina Stefanidi and a classroom reading guide by sport psychologist Dr. Melissa I. White. The audiobook, narrated by Audie and Emmy winner Tavia Gilbert, is beautiful.
Tavia Gilbert, an Audie Award-winning narrator who has performed more than 700 solo, multi-cast, and full-cast audiobooks, reads Maggie Vaults Over the Moon. AudioFile on her performance: "splendid portrayals that will thoroughly engage listeners."