A slew of inquisitive adults have made it clear that there’s more to high school sports than acne-anxious athletes. We found out why. By Jenna Schnuer

High school sports. The subject has become a genre all its own. While H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger’s 1990 book Friday Night Lights (later a movie and now, as if you hadn’t heard, a TV show) and the 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams laid a solid foundation for the category, several new authors and directors have picked up the ball and — you know what’s coming here — run with it. Some recent additions to the category’s MVP lineup include, on the small screen, Two-a-Days, MTV’s oddly addictive reality series about the Hoover, Alabama, football team; and the books Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland by Mark Kreidler (Harper­Collins), about high school wrestlers in Iowa, and Eagle Blue: A Team, a Tribe, and a High School Basketball Season in Arctic Alaska by Michael D’Orso (Bloomsbury USA), about basketball in the bush village of Fort Yukon, Alaska. We talked to Kreidler and D’Orso to find out why they wanted to go back to high school.