Excellent historical recount of women's basketball, going all the way back to the sport's inception. The history is given life with the lively characters and events that gave us the women's sport we all love. The new chapters are excellent additions to an already great piece of basketball nonfiction.

Shattering the Glass is a comprehensive and compelling read about the history of women and basketball. It was initially written in 2005 but revised for 2025 as the sport has ascended. In those twenty years, we've gone from the WNBA being mildly successful at best to top recruits entering college basketball with 500k—to 1 million social media followers. Oh yeah, and Caitlin Clark happened. So, what better time to release a revised edition of the book?

This fascinating book looks at the very beginning of organized women's basketball in the late 1890s and the seemingly one-step-forward, two-steps-back history of the sport due to male athletic directors, politicians trying to undermine Title IX, and, of course, the incompetence and thinly veiled misogyny of the Walter Byers-led NCAA. Then again, when has the NCAA ever been correct on anything? But I digress.

I learned so much about the early days of the sport - whether it was traveling AAU teams, companies that sponsored women's basketball to get their product name out, or states where women's high school basketball was highly successful. A few of these players and teams are posthumously in the Naismith Hall of Fame, but it was neat to learn about all the exploits of these young women who were of immense talent but mostly lost to history. The book has some really cool pictures from archives of the first few decades of women's basketball. This book is well-researched but doesn't read like an academic tome.

I highly recommend this revised book to any basketball fan, regardless of their interest in the women's game.

The University of North Carolina Press provided me with an ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for this complementary ARC in exchange for my honest review!

This book is a full historical summary of women's basketball from the very beginning in the early 1900s up to the 2024 WNBA season. It's rare that I read a book on sports history without knowing the majority of the stories - but this was a rare exception as I didn't know a lot about women's basketball prior to the past few decades.

The author does a fantastic job detailing the early days of basketball and the variety of issues that women faced while trying to start up college teams. The shift in types of challenges, but not the amount, is really interesting to follow as women's basketball becomes more popular throughout time. I found the more recent seasons were breezed through more quickly than the past, but it is much easier to access information on the status of 2024 than it is for 1924.

I recommend this book for any basketball fan as it shares a lot of information that has not been told before in other books.

thank you to netgalley for the arc!!

normally i would never request a nonfiction book as an arc because that's making a committment and i need to be mood-reading for nonfiction, but considering women's basketball is one of my capital-I Interests i made an exception for this one. i heart women's basketball <33

honestly i was surprised by how much of the history i knew already! most of the new stuff i learned was from the pre-WNBA/ABL era, when women were just starting to play basketball. i was also surprised by how widespread it was in the 20s/30s --- apparently men and women played almost equally before the idea of a "nuclear family" and "traditional family values" became super prevalent.

i will always be a kim mulkey hater idc what she did for the game. i know she was a good player. if kim mulkey has no haters i am dead.

i really wish this book had been able to include this WNBA season because a LOT of stuff happened during it (especially with the context of it being caitlin clark and angel reese's rookie seasons) but i understand that there is always a point where you have to stop so the book can actually get published lol

I really enjoyed getting to learn about the history of women’s basketball, it does a great job in telling the story and was enjoying the overall concept of this. I thought it was well researched and enjoyed the way Pamela Grundy and Susan Shackelford wrote this. It’s a great book for sports fans and was everything that I wanted.

I'm a big fan of women's basketball and I didn't know the full extent of its history, so this was a very interesting read for me! It was really cool to see all the pictures of athletes going way back to the early 1900s. Enjoyed it and learned a lot, 5 stars!