Team Park

Eleven- (nearly twelve-) year-old Evan Park is not cut out for sports. Unfortunately for Evan, his father was a high school rugby star, and his older sister Lydia is a talented gymnast. Between the two of them, the Park family’s trophy case is filled with medals and trophies – and Evan’s measly participation ribbons. Evan’s dad badly wants him to participate in team sports, something Evan and Lydia have deemed “not his thing”. So, when Evan breaks his wrist playing soccer, he figures he can get his dad to let him quit team sports and instead spend the summer finding the thing that works for him, Evan re-injures his wrist, making it so he won’t finish training in time for the Dominator Ninja tryouts. Upset, Evan goes into a slump, not even jumping on the trampoline with his sisters anymore. However, one day, Lydia shows Evan a video of a competition show called Soiled Pants where all the events and competitors are covered in mud. She tells Evan that there’s a team version of Soiled Pants happening at the end of the summer right in Vancouver. Lydia and Georgia manage to convince Evan that, even if he can’t compete in Dominator Ninja, he could be a dirty ninja with his family on Soiled Pants.

Evan and his sisters manage to convince their father, an easy task, and their unfit mother, a more difficult task, to join Team Park, and each tackles an event for Soiled Pants. The family trains together, resulting in some tension between Evan’s highly competitive father and his much less competitive mother. But, when Team Park arrives on competition day, they find out that not only are some of the events changed, the final event where the family has to scale a large wall has been exaggerated to the point where they’re not sure they’ll even finish the race. The family will have to set aside their differences and come together to get through the race, have fun, and get messy.

Team Park is a seemingly innocuous fun summer read for middle schoolers, but Ahn’s writing goes deeper than that. Evan’s summer of fun is also a summer of self-discovery and self-efficacy. Evan learns to focus on what he can do rather than what he can’t, and, more than that, he learns to think outside the box that was prescribed for him by his father. Evan’s story is one of learning to trust yourself over what others think of you, and Evan manages to teach his whole family this in the course of the book.

However, while Evan may be our protagonist, the Park family is at the heart of the book, and Ahn does an excellent job flushing out the dynamics of the family. The running theme of tension between almost all of the family members, except for Georgia, sets the stage for the ending of the family’s coming together and relying on each other to succeed in the race. While it is ultimately Evan’s story, Ahn’s writing is, above all else, about family.
Team Park is a coming-of-age story that shows it’s not just the children that can come of age. The Park family all come into their own in their training and striving to win the race, but more importantly, the family comes together to do it.