The Assist: Hoops, Hope, and the Game of Their Lives

Jack O'Brien, the impossibly demanding basketball coach at Charlestown High School in Boston, has led his team to five state championship titles in six years. Less talked about is O'Brien's other winning record: Nearly every one of the players who stuck with his program -- poor kids growing up in high-crime neighborhoods and saddled with the lousy educational system available in urban America -- managed to get to college. But O'Brien is no saint. Saints give without expecting anything in re...