Welcome to the SI.com Book Club. Each month, we'll review a sports book and offer an excerpt. February's selection: Transition Game: How Hoosiers Went Hip-Hop.

February 2005 Cover Courtesy: Putnam Publishing Group Inside Transition Game • The 10 Spot's review | Read an excerpt | Buy it Hot Off The Press Juiced By Jose Canseco ($25.95). You may have heard about this one. If not, ask around. The Miracle of St. Anthony By Adrian Wojnarowski ($25). Coach Bob Hurley's success at a New Jersey high school. The Jump By Ian O'Connor ($23.95). Inside story of NBAer Sebastian Telfair's rags-to-riches journey. Sir Walter By Tom Clavin ($26). Did Walter Hagen invent golf? No, but he helped it grow. Bleeding Pinstripes By Filip Bondy ($24.95). Hanging out with the bleacher creatures at Yankee Stadium. Just For Openers The first three lines of Season Of Life by Jeffrey Marx ($18): Young faces usually filled with warmth and wonder were now taut with anticipation and purpose. Eyes were lasers. Hearts were pounding. Five Under $5 Think words are cheap? These books won't break your bank (prices from barnesandnoble.com): • Mia Hamm By Sean Adams ($4.95). Bio of U.S. women's soccer star (and Nomar's gal). • Think Like A Fish By Tom Mann ($4.99). Everything you wanted to know about bass fishermen. • Lance Armstrong: The Race Of His Life By Kristin Armstrong ($3.99). Think she wants a do-over? • A Flame Of Pure Fire By Roger Kahn ($4.98). Jack Dempsey and the Roaring '20s. • Home And Away By Scott Simon ($3.98). Checking out the sports scene in Chicago. Previous Book Club selections • When Nothing Else Matters by Michael Leahy. • Faithful by Stewart O'Nan and Stephen King.

Misfortune led Sports Illustrated writer L. Jon Wertheim to check in on the boys basketball team of his former high school in Bloomington, Ind., a few years ago for the first time in more than a decade. Wertheim was seeking a momentary diversion while visiting his ill father, who was waging an ultimately unsuccessful battle with cancer. But Wertheim's old stomping grounds looked anything but familiar, with the mostly white, crew-cut, earth-bound jump-shooters he knew from the late '80s having been replaced by Jay Z-playing, multi-ethnic skywalkers who struggled to make a free throw.

Fortunately for readers, that one discordant night in a southern Indiana high school gym was the genesis of the terrific Transition Game: How Hoosiers Went Hip-Hop. Wertheim uses Indiana high school hoops, and the 2003-04 Bloomington North boys team in particular, to demonstrate how much the game of basketball has changed -- not just in the Hoosier state but across the broader culture as well.

Transition Game is really two books in one. The heart of the book is a narrative of the Bloomington North Cougars' season. We get to know coach Tom McKinney and his players as they chase a state title. When the Cougars play arch rival Bloomington South in the sectional playoffs late in the book, we really care who wins.

Interspersed between the chronicling of the Cougars' quest are a number of lengthy interludes touching on other aspects of Indiana basketball. Here we check in with former Indiana legend Damon Bailey, who never made it in the NBA; the seismic changes at the Indiana University basketball program after coach Bob Knight was forced out; the rise of the women's game at the high school level and at Purdue; and glitzy Conseco Fieldhouse, home to the Pacers and their phalanx of straight-from-high-school players.

A less talented writer could have gotten bogged down with this dual approach, but Wertheim pulls it off with aplomb. The lengthy diversions don't feel pasted on to the Bloomington North story but become organic to the larger theme that the times, they are a' changing. The author never overreaches in tying his various threads together, instead making a case by dint of far-reaching reporting and clear prose that becomes much stronger for its subtlety.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that Wertheim can craft elegant sentences like this one: "The school bus transporting the Bloomington North basketball team rolled down State Road 37, rumbling like an empty stomach as a marmalade sun ducked beneath the horizon."