Ready to Score

Ready to Score by Jodie Slaughter (publication day June 3, 2025) immersed me in southern high school football like I never expected in a sapphic romance!

Jade Dunn, math teacher and first black woman assistant football coach in their small South Carolina town, has the feeling that the head coach is going to retire, and she’s been working for years to be in the right place to replace him. But on her periphery is Francesca (Franny) Lim, 2-year newcomer to town, and art teacher. Jade doesn’t understand how she can be so nice, all of the time, and when she finds out Franny has real coaching experience from back in Houston, she knows that Franny is going to try to take that coaching spot that Jade has been working for. Jade thinks that their town will only tolerate one female coach, and it needs to be her.

Of course, there’s attraction on both sides, but more than a few misunderstandings and sometimes outright unkindness. But they both have the student-players best interests in mind and eventually get out of their own ways to come together. The spicy scenes were hot, and I did like Jade’s evolution to not being so single-minded with the head coaching job as her only goal.

Although the cover shows two straight-sized women, some of the descriptions could be seen as fat-positive! My only criticism is that Frannie didn’t quite read as an art teacher to me–there was no discussion of what kind of art she did outside of school for herself, nor did art seem to be as important to her as football. I thought it might have been better for her to be a health teacher or something else–she wasn’t as quirky and bohemian as most art teachers that I’ve known.

Nevertheless, I did enjoy it, and think the representation of a multicultural black and Korean lesbian relationship, between teacher-coaches, was great.