Trust Your Name

After Bobby Byington's unforgettable winning high-school season, Coach Robison recruits Choctaw players from several communities to play in a summer league. Coach selects the Panther as the team's mascot, saying, "To many Choctaws, young and old, the Panther is an elder watching over us, helping us when we are in need."

As the team gels and moves to the national tournament, they find out they are up against more than other basketball teams. They must deal with racist taunts and unfair sportsmanship on the court. The situation comes to a head when, on the eve of a key game against a bullying opponent, two Choctaw players are arrested for robbery.

Never doubting their innocence, Coach Robison asks, "Who can we trust, and how can we find the truth?"

Tim Tingle is an Oklahoma Choctaw and an award-winning author and storyteller. Tim performs a Choctaw story before Chief Batton's State of the Nation address at every Choctaw Nation Labor Day Festival. In June 2011, Tim spoke at the Library of Congress and performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. From 2011 to 2016 he was featured at Choctaw Days, a celebration at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.

Tim's great-great-grandfather, John Carnes, walked the Trail of Tears in 1835. In 1992, Tim retraced the trail to Choctaw homelands in Mississippi, a journey that inspired his first book, Walking the Choctaw Road. Tim's first Pathfinders novel, Danny Blackgoat: Navajo Prisoner, was an American Indian Youth Literature Awards honor book in 2014. In 2018, Tim received the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book. That same year, A Name Earned, the third book in his No Name series for young readers, earned a Kirkus starred review.