Quinn Cotter, a young athlete who's a young author

One of the pleasures of writing a book about kids and sports is getting a chance to meet others who've been thinking - and sometimes writing - about the same issues. I'll have that opportunity next month, after publication of "Until It Hurts", when I meet Quinn Cotter.

Quinn is not just another deep thinker on this subject. He's an author - his book "Playing Time, What Kids Think About Youth Sports" will be published soon.

And Quinn is an especially young author. A high school sophomore, he is 16. We'll be speaking together on a youth sports panel at the City Lit Festival at Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Library, Central Branch, Saturday, April 18 at noon.

This from an article at the Web site of the Gilman School, where Quinn is a student and a baseball player.

"Playing Time really got its start in 2006, when Cotter was 14 and presented a shoebox full of his note cards to his parents on Christmas Day, telling them of his intent to make the book a reality.

"From there, he set about finding an agent, scouring the internet and sending out query letters, hoping the combination of teenage author and organized, well-written manuscript would make for a persuasive case.Though Cotter began his note cards at the age of 10, he says that many of his stories come from experiences he had not forgotten, all the way back to the age of 5.

“The book is really based on my experiences, not on others’ experiences or what people have told me,” Cotter says. “I think it has a good communicative style. It’s different. It really came straight from the note cards. If you were to see the original copy of the manuscript, note cards and paper are stuck together.”

Congratulations, Quinn. And see you next month.